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Marty’s Trump-prolonging nightmare scenarios:

At the danger of making these self-fulfilling prophesies, I’m sharing several nightmare scenarios that I fear could prolong our tenure in Trumpville beyond 2020. 

First  — 45 overstays his welcome by declaring a national emergency and postponing the November 2020 elections, as catastrophes consume America:  disastrous Midwestern fracking earthquakes and water poisoning, or raging Western forest fires, or overwhelming Category 4-5 East and Gulf Coast hurricanes; or thousands or millions of Americans becoming homeless refugees.  And/or a war or the Yellowstone Caldera could erupt, or a meteor could strike Earth.  Part of the emergency will be the administration’s inability to handle an emergency.

Second – key blocks of citizens don’t get to vote against 45.  Power is a drug, Republicans have become addicts, and a fix is offered every election cycle by disenfranchising voters, gerrymandering districts, undermining faith in U.S. institutions to create voter apathy, and winning less populous “red” state elections to skew Electoral College votes that outweigh the U.S. popular vote (e.g., Bush v. Gore, Clinton v. Trump).  And then, the “Bernie or Nobody” crowd could pass on voting for any Democrat and throw the election to 45.

Or Third – Republicans and 45 capitalize on the docile herd animals called “humans,” who believe in fantasy like it’s reality, take breaks to chase novelties and shiny objects, and are drawn to leaders who threaten or cajole them into mythical love or submission.  These leaders are called “Alpha-animals.”  Our U.S. President is an Alpha-pretending, fantasy spinning, idiot savant of distraction (gaslighting, Tweetstorm, ridiculous public statement, & 14 lies-a-day master).  We pay attention because he’s the power player – POTUS.  We want to ignore him, but horrified fascination keeps us looking. 

            Historically, human society and activity can be described by a simple pyramid, whether it’s organized religion, empire, monarchy, corporation, drug cartel or authoritarian government:

                                                /              \

                                               /    Tribal     \

                                             /  Patriarchal   \

                                           /    Dictatorial     \

                                         /     Hierarchical     \

                                       /        Theocratic         \

                                     /___________________\

In America, that has meant a society dominated and designed by White, Male, Alpha-directed, Top-down organized, Christian-Capitalists.  The other tribes – people of color, immigrants, non-Christians, etc. have been marginalized or shut out of control positions in society.

So Fourth – 45 could be re-elected by playing on White people’s fear of non-white others.  Every authoritarian government in human history has (sadly) affirmed that humans respond more to fear than love.  You don’t need the Nazis, or Lederer’s A Nation of Sheep, or Harari’s Sapiens trilogy. to tell you love is powerful until the loving person gets threatened or killed.  Then survivors fear for their safety and lives.  Ideologues, marauders, conquerors and religious zealots always use violence on “non-believers” when they can’t persuade with words or deeds

Studies show that despots and authoritarian rulers win popular support and retain legitimacy using notions and beliefs that “bolster willing obedience.” Also, they keep a monopoly over use of force; control of economic and infrastructural resources; and a strong and sustainable administrative apparatus.  It enables powerful minorities to control population majorities.

Humans also tend to not think ahead or self-reflect – unless we’re pregnant females (and perhaps their partners).  Thinking ahead generally invites (a) arguments about which plan is best, and (b) delays to study the plan and make excuses about why it’s too challenging and/or expensive to do.  

Self-reflection is a thicket, too.  As Harari observes in 21 Lesson For The 21^st Century, do Christians ask themselves how a religion based on love begot the Crusades, Inquisition, witch hunts, the 30 Years’ War and anti-Semitism?  Do Marxists ask how Marx’s teachings led to Stalin, the gulags and the Cultural Revolution? Or scientists ask how the scientific project has led to destabilizing the global ecosystem? Or geneticists ask how that helped Nazis hijack Darwinist theories?  Do capitalists ask how the “free market” created slave plantations, the Great Depression, today’s homeless crisis, and Facebook destabilizing Western democracy?  No.

So back to my nightmares about how Trump & Co. stay in office past 2020:

            1.  Monopolizing force by:

                        a.  Calling out the U.S. Army to “guard” polling places and scare away voters

                        b.  Calling on his “fine people” (Charlottesville, white supremacist & neo-Nazi gangs) to battle opponents.  Will militias drilling in American forests, and in 2016 occupied the Malheur national refuge in Oregon – take sides, and if so, whose?  Will U.S. Armed Forces (and/or National Guard and/or local police) crush the gangs or do 45’s bidding?  What will 2^nd Amendment advocates do – support or fight the President and the gangs?

            2.  Not playing by the rules:  Jennifer Senior asked why R’s don’t, and Democrats and Independents do play by the rules (Oct. 2019 NY Times op-ed).  In today’s income polarized America, corporations are “persons” (SCOTUS Santa Clara 1886), money is “speech” (Citizens United 2010), and Senate and House R’s now block all legislative progress at the federal level, as they and 45 continue to run circles around hapless Democrats who “play by the rules.”

            3.  Attacking the impeachment process, (a) by declaring it unconstitutional, (b) calling all Congressional subpoenas for witnesses invalid, (c) calling the process a “Deep State” attempt to pull off a coup against His Unitary Executive-ship, or an attempt to undo the 2016 election.

            4.  Challenging Congress and the Supreme Court to unseat him.  Both the Supreme Court, and the Senate that would try Prez 45 are in sympathetic Republican hands (that’s another issue – how to eliminate politics from judicial nominations & appointments?)

            5. Delegitimizing the 2020 election, by indoctrinating Trump Herd supporters, with Fox News help, to view any close or contested 2020 election as an excuse to ignore the results (see Second above), so the D.C Police or U.S. Army would have to drag him out of the White House (Raw Story 10/13/2019) (see 1.b. above),

            6.  Declaring widespread voter fraud (see Second above) so he can remain in the White House post-election until a fraud investigation has finished.

            7.  Democrats give 2020 Senate and Presidential elections away to Trump and R’s, by continued in-fighting, and failure to agree on and strongly support a good presidential candidate.

Activist Aditi Juneja asks all 2020 candidates what they’ll do to prevent another president like Trump, assure that federal checks and balances will work, and that elections will be free, fair and accessible?” (Talking Points Memo Oct. 14, 2019.  U.S. democracy is not guaranteed, she says.  “It’s an idea that each generation has to renew and redefine.”

All of our American ancestors are immigrants who came here to escape persecution or famine, or/and to find safe haven and new opportunities IN America.  Now we, their heirs may have to think about where in the world we can go to find places that are safe FROM America.  Having to start that search is my worst nightmare.

Contributed by: Martin Westerman 11/18/19

Marty’s Trump-prolonging nightmare scenarios:

At the danger of making these self-fulfilling prophesies, I’m sharing several nightmare scenarios that I fear could prolong our tenure in Trumpville beyond 2020. 

First  — 45 overstays his welcome by declaring a national emergency and postponing the November 2020 elections, as catastrophes consume America:  disastrous Midwestern fracking earthquakes and water poisoning, or raging Western forest fires, or overwhelming Category 4-5 East and Gulf Coast hurricanes; or thousands or millions of Americans becoming homeless refugees.  And/or a war or the Yellowstone Caldera could erupt, or a meteor could strike Earth.  Part of the emergency will be the administration’s inability to handle an emergency.

Second – key blocks of citizens don’t get to vote against 45.  Power is a drug, Republicans have become addicts, and a fix is offered every election cycle by disenfranchising voters, gerrymandering districts, undermining faith in U.S. institutions to create voter apathy, and winning less populous “red” state elections to skew Electoral College votes that outweigh the U.S. popular vote (e.g., Bush v. Gore, Clinton v. Trump).  And then, the “Bernie or Nobody” crowd could pass on voting for any Democrat and throw the election to 45.

Or Third – Republicans and 45 capitalize on the docile herd animals called “humans,” who believe in fantasy like it’s reality, take breaks to chase novelties and shiny objects, and are drawn to leaders who threaten or cajole them into mythical love or submission.  These leaders are called “Alpha-animals.”  Our U.S. President is an Alpha-pretending, fantasy spinning, idiot savant of distraction (gaslighting, Tweetstorm, ridiculous public statement, & 14 lies-a-day master).  We pay attention because he’s the power player – POTUS.  We want to ignore him, but horrified fascination keeps us looking. 

            Historically, human society and activity can be described by a simple pyramid, whether it’s organized religion, empire, monarchy, corporation, drug cartel or authoritarian government:

                                                /              \

                                               /    Tribal     \

                                             /  Patriarchal   \

                                           /    Dictatorial     \

                                         /     Hierarchical     \

                                       /        Theocratic         \

                                     /___________________\

In America, that has meant a society dominated and designed by White, Male, Alpha-directed, Top-down organized, Christian-Capitalists.  The other tribes – people of color, immigrants, non-Christians, etc. have been marginalized or shut out of control positions in society.

So Fourth – 45 could be re-elected by playing on White people’s fear of non-white others.  Every authoritarian government in human history has (sadly) affirmed that humans respond more to fear than love.  You don’t need the Nazis, or Lederer’s A Nation of Sheep, or Harari’s Sapiens trilogy. to tell you love is powerful until the loving person gets threatened or killed.  Then survivors fear for their safety and lives.  Ideologues, marauders, conquerors and religious zealots always use violence on “non-believers” when they can’t persuade with words or deeds

Studies show that despots and authoritarian rulers win popular support and retain legitimacy using notions and beliefs that “bolster willing obedience.” Also, they keep a monopoly over use of force; control of economic and infrastructural resources; and a strong and sustainable administrative apparatus.  It enables powerful minorities to control population majorities.

Humans also tend to not think ahead or self-reflect – unless we’re pregnant females (and perhaps their partners).  Thinking ahead generally invites (a) arguments about which plan is best, and (b) delays to study the plan and make excuses about why it’s too challenging and/or expensive to do.  

Self-reflection is a thicket, too.  As Harari observes in 21 Lesson For The 21^st Century, do Christians ask themselves how a religion based on love begot the Crusades, Inquisition, witch hunts, the 30 Years’ War and anti-Semitism?  Do Marxists ask how Marx’s teachings led to Stalin, the gulags and the Cultural Revolution? Or scientists ask how the scientific project has led to destabilizing the global ecosystem? Or geneticists ask how that helped Nazis hijack Darwinist theories?  Do capitalists ask how the “free market” created slave plantations, the Great Depression, today’s homeless crisis, and Facebook destabilizing Western democracy?  No.

So back to my nightmares about how Trump & Co. stay in office past 2020:

            1.  Monopolizing force by:

                        a.  Calling out the U.S. Army to “guard” polling places and scare away voters

                        b.  Calling on his “fine people” (Charlottesville, white supremacist & neo-Nazi gangs) to battle opponents.  Will militias drilling in American forests, and in 2016 occupied the Malheur national refuge in Oregon – take sides, and if so, whose?  Will U.S. Armed Forces (and/or National Guard and/or local police) crush the gangs or do 45’s bidding?  What will 2^nd Amendment advocates do – support or fight the President and the gangs?

            2.  Not playing by the rules:  Jennifer Senior asked why R’s don’t, and Democrats and Independents do play by the rules (Oct. 2019 NY Times op-ed).  In today’s income polarized America, corporations are “persons” (SCOTUS Santa Clara 1886), money is “speech” (Citizens United 2010), and Senate and House R’s now block all legislative progress at the federal level, as they and 45 continue to run circles around hapless Democrats who “play by the rules.”

            3.  Attacking the impeachment process, (a) by declaring it unconstitutional, (b) calling all Congressional subpoenas for witnesses invalid, (c) calling the process a “Deep State” attempt to pull off a coup against His Unitary Executive-ship, or an attempt to undo the 2016 election.

            4.  Challenging Congress and the Supreme Court to unseat him.  Both the Supreme Court, and the Senate that would try Prez 45 are in sympathetic Republican hands (that’s another issue – how to eliminate politics from judicial nominations & appointments?)

            5. Delegitimizing the 2020 election, by indoctrinating Trump Herd supporters, with Fox News help, to view any close or contested 2020 election as an excuse to ignore the results (see Second above), so the D.C Police or U.S. Army would have to drag him out of the White House (Raw Story 10/13/2019) (see 1.b. above),

            6.  Declaring widespread voter fraud (see Second above) so he can remain in the White House post-election until a fraud investigation has finished.

            7.  Democrats give 2020 Senate and Presidential elections away to Trump and R’s, by continued in-fighting, and failure to agree on and strongly support a good presidential candidate.

Activist Aditi Juneja asks all 2020 candidates what they’ll do to prevent another president like Trump, assure that federal checks and balances will work, and that elections will be free, fair and accessible?” (Talking Points Memo Oct. 14, 2019.  U.S. democracy is not guaranteed, she says.  “It’s an idea that each generation has to renew and redefine.”

All of our American ancestors are immigrants who came here to escape persecution or famine, or/and to find safe haven and new opportunities IN America.  Now we, their heirs may have to think about where in the world we can go to find places that are safe FROM America.  Having to start that search is my worst nightmare.

• Oct 23, 2019

According to this Mike Pence had known about the quid-pro-quo all along, and thus, in his compliance, has been totally corrupted. Once a person is corrupted, the condition becomes unalterable. It sticks to him/her forever, compromising the “immune system”, and continues to spread, having created yet another carrier.

Once a person “misdeeds” it becomes almost inevitable for more misdeeds to follow as each misdeed is further self rationalized. It finally, mercifully, becomes like a “house of cards.” This is how dictatorships are formed, out of a sort of epidemic phenomena, with people infecting each other.

This is the ultimate sin of Trump, having nurtured and spread a disease, and now affecting the souls of many, somewhat like Aids affects an afflicted human body. (this also means that impeachment would have to reach down to Pence and below)

Like any fast spreading virus, it is all too easy to see this becoming a planetary phenomena. There are already too many signs.

Trump voters and followers are infected. They believed him, voted for him, and continue to support him. One of the psychological effects of such a disease, cognitive dissonance, induces denial in the afflicted. No one likes to admit to illness and being sickly. They will continue to deny even what their own eyes see, and look away, and deflect, as they too have been infected.

This is really a Code 1 alert! When will the fever break? Or will our world be the next Atlantis?

D. DRUMPF: CATALYST FOR OUR TIME

9/15/19

Martin Westerman

Our nearly four years with the unprecedented candidate-President Drumpf-tRump-45, bring three movies to mind for me – The Producers, Sneakers (the original hacker movie) and Galaxy Quest (the Star Trek spoof J.J. Abrams loves).  You can get the day-by-day Presidency count from Brian Williams every night on his 11^th Hour MSNBC show – as of September 1, 2019, it’s 954 (excruciating) days.

The scene that provides my umbrella for this odyssey comes near the end of The Producers.  Zero Mostel’s character, producer Max Bialashtok, sits in the rubble of his theatre, looking skyward and asking, “I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast. Where did I go right?” 

Trump was the wrong candidate and is the wrong President for so many reasons:  misogyny & gaslighting; rich-boy entitlement, narcissism & white privilege; support for white supremacy, fascism; divisiveness & propagandizing; vengefulness, immigrant- and race-baiting; faux-patriotism & aiding America’s enemies; failed businesses & trade wars; climate change denial; personal and institutional disloyalty (bordering on treason); dismissal of facts, opposing research & truth; epic dishonesty, religious indifference, and hatred of pet dogs. 

With all these negatives, he has become a catalyst for our time. Thanks to the dynamics of 45, he and his supporters, for all the wrong reasons, have confronted us with all the “right” things the majority of Americans (the other 65-70% of us) must now address:

• #metoo, the roles of women in society & embedded misogyny;
• #blacklivesmatter, embedded U.S. racism (from today’s local neighborhoods back to the 1789 U.S. Constitution), police bias & responses to white supremacist riots;
• immigrants’ rights, the asylum process vs. “homeland security,” & U.S. Latin American policy (and international relations);
• news media false equivalencies: “balanced coverage” that makes chronic liars look equal to research, data and facts; #fakenews; & social media hacking;
• nepotism, emoluments, corrupt practices & accountability for public servants;
• undermining U.S. institutions, including courts, intelligence, investigative and policing services; and support and regulation agencies
• the dependably re-elected, legacy beneficiaries of political gerrymandering;
• money in politics, income disparities (& favoritism for the rich), and failures to apply federal anti-trust and state corporate charter regulatory laws, and
• governmental balance of powers, and the structure of the U.S. Constitution – including the continued efficacy of the Electoral College vs. popular votes, 2^nd Amendment, embedded racism, and whether or not the U.S. President and any other high-ranking official is governed by the law.

As much as I’d prefer Hilary, If  she had become President, it’s unlikely the Democrats would have re-taken the U.S. House, nor won so many state and local offices, nor would so many Republican lawmakers now be resigning.  It’s unlikely that national revulsion at 45 would have brought all these “right” issues to a head.  Hilary would have been dogged by Republican hounds gnawing at her heels, yapping at & blocking her every move.  McConnell would not be known as Moscow Mitch, nor Graham as Leningrad Lindsey.

Looking ahead, I keep in mind the old warnings from Sneakers (1992) and Galaxy Quest (1999), for our future elections:

• Beware computer hacking – warns the villain Cosmo (Ben Kingsley) to the hero Martin (Robert Redford):  “The world isn’t run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money, it’s run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It’s all just electrons. … And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information.”
• Mind your history:  Guy (Sam Rockwell) snatches Gwen (Sigourny Weaver) back from walking into a trap, and barks:  “Don’t you watch the show?!”

Let’s appreciate how interesting are the times we live in.  And make sure we do the right things – for all the right, and/or for all the wrong reasons.

WESTERMAN 09-01-19 GUN MANAGEMENT: Trump Universe  BLOG POST

I’m fresh from another Facebook exchange with 2^nd Amendment “defenders.” Their standard litany: “Gun regulations: will crooks comply?” and “There is NO WAY to keep criminals from obtaining guns! Therefore gun control measures serve only to DISARM the LAW-ABIDING!” 

The gun control litany is, owners of deadly weapons should get trained AND licensed.  I prefer to say “gun management,” not control.  With 393 million guns in America (incl. 15 million assault rifles), we’re not going to control them now.  We have to manage their owners.

Nearly 65% of Americans, and more than 75% of gun owners support universal background checks, & sometimes more (red flag, safe storage, etc.).  If we subtract 75% of gun owners from 100%, that leaves 25% or fewer gun owners who radically defend the 2^nd Amendment. 

So, why does our 65% gun management majority act like a shivering elephant cornered by a screaming, <25% pro-gun mouse?  Who is that elephant, anyway?  It’s the insurance, medical, healthcare, property management, hospitality, retail, entertainment, construction, and funeral industries, plus law enforcement, governments, and faith based organizations.  That’s a lot of industries harmed by guns.  It’s time the elephant pulled itself together and squashed the mouse.

As unruly children need structure, so do unruly adults – and markets.  Regulated markets operate equitably, unregulated markets don’t.  The gun industry and its supporters are barely regulated, and they’re protected from lawsuits and liability.  Unregulated market participants are basically pirates.  The gun pirates are depriving us of our Constitutionally-granted rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Let’s transform these unruly folk into law-abiding citizens.

Since our government is slow to act, and our faith communities have only moral-ethical, not regulatory authority, we must turn to businesses.  They act faster, and this is a business issue. 

Example: the 2017 Las Vegas concert shooting (what happened in Vegas didn’t stay there):

• insurers paid for everything from wrongful death, injury & health care claims (some still running), to repairing the Mandalay Bay and concert venue,
• concert organizers had to refund ticket fees, and increase security spending,
• all Las Vegas hotels and LV Strip tourist attractions lost business,
• Nevada state paid L&I claims; tourist agencies (funded by NV businesses) paid crisis, emergency & image management costs to mitigate damages,
• The City of Las Vegas spent massive amounts on medical response, law enforcement and coroners, and have had to increase those expenditures
• local hospitals incurred massive emergency & long term medical costs,
• the funeral industry mopped up.

That’s a lot of business “firepower” vs. the ≤ 25%-ers.  Let’s work backwards from the murdered:

• The funeral industry could say gun victims aren’t the dead they want to handle.  It’s blood money.  What will the NRA say? “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you!”?
• The news media:  they already condemn gun violence, and some international news organizations have declared the U.S. a virtual war zone for their staffs.
• Insurers:  do they want to continue paying massive claims?  And it’s more likely for a gun accident to occur in a gun-owning home than in a non-gun one.  Why are the low-risk gun-less people paying higher premiums?  Higher risk gun owners should pay more.
• The medical establishment is already on board calling for broader gun regulation, and for treating gun violence a national, public health crisis.
• Entertainment, hospitality, travel & tourism, property management: demand regulation to keep ticket buyers, show attendees, tourists, shoppers, visitors and residents confident they’ll be safe in their own homes, cities and country.
• Retailers:  like Walmart, restrict buyer ages, & limit firearm types & ammo for purchase.

Consider:  the NRA is anti-economical.  When it discounts school shootings – killing youngsters who’ll grow up to pay into pension, healthcare and retirement systems that will keep the NRA’s members comfortable in their old ages – it’s helping kill the geese who’ll lay their golden eggs.

And governments:  at least fly flags at half-mast nationwide for 30 days after a mass shooting, to honor the dead and remind America these are national tragedies.  Then, work to assign costs of gun mayhem to manufacturers & perpetrators, and to eliminate liability protections.  And when≤ 25%-ers occupy federal lands, stop cowering and go arrest them.  That’s your federal job.

It’s fine to support the 2nd Amendment; keep guns for hunting, target shooting, collecting, and for personal defense (although statistics say your less safe packing than running and hiding).  If the ≤ 25%-ers & NRA were smart in the face of gun-caused carnage, they’d quit screaming “hands off my guns!-no regulations-thoughts & prayers-the killer was crazy!”  Because that’s what makes the 65% want to regulate guns, and keep everybody from ever buying or owning one.

Submitted by Martin Westerman

https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnyti.ms%2F2UVJsez&data=02%7C01%7C%7C255cd07724de47df17a508d7394a14f5%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637040862646142667&sdata=VgEIlvs4HRqWVVYF3AXQ1Rb99MC5InvObOwz2er3rYs%3D&reserved
>
> This idea means that if you buy a treasury bill, you will have less money at the end of its term than you started with. You will literally pay a fee just to own an investment that has a guaranteed loss built in! Keep in mind that we can’t lower formerly created liabilities, that is previously issued government bonds, because interest rates cannot be legally lowered on Treasury bonds.
> Now since we finance our Hugh budget shortfall and redeeming of our previously issued maturing bonds, each year (billions of dollars), by borrowing more(that is, issuing new bonds) , and rational investors (as most treasury bill investors are) will not hand over good money buying bonds that guarantee a loss, the policy will need to be quickly reversed or we will just have to print the dollars not provided by investors (causing an inflation the likes of which have never been seen in the US.)

And this brings us to another dilemma, not one that Trump can easily solve, and may greatly work against his re-election (assuming the dems bring it up). That is, the sorry plight of older retirees, looking for positive returns on their life savings. Many of them, looking for very low risk investments, such as bank certificates, that yield enough interest to match their expenses, will have no where to turn.

And what about workers’ pensions? Pensions have been drastically affected by low interest rates. Recent reports about General Electric, for example, highlight the problem. In an earlier post, we highlighted how Mitch McConnells’ clearly unqualified brother-in-law (Gordon Hartogensis), somehow got to head up the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp. It is this agency that monitors and bails out underfunded and/or failed corporate pension plans. These pension plans have been devastated by low interest rates (because the companies that fund them are compelled to make higher (often impossibly high) contributions when interest rates decline, in order to meet pension funding requirements. Of course, no one realized that the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation would require some real expertise when its former, highly qualified head, was fired to make room for Hartogensis.

General Electrics’ pension plan (along with others) threatens to drive that company into bankruptcy due to the persistence of low interest rates over the last several years. Consequently, retiring and/or terminating employees will suffer greatly, and all the more as Trump tries to engineer continued lower interest rates.

Will they connect their plight to Trump? A person with the mental capacity of a thirteen year old. A person who cannot see forward to likely and unlikely outcomes to his brash actions. A mentally deficient person. A dangerously mentally deficient person, because his field of “vision” restricts itself solely to what he thinks may benefit him most and most immediately. Long range vision? We often talk about great people of vision. Trump has none.

Hopefully the Dems will help all the harmed persons see that it was Trump and his cohorts that inflicted that harm on them.

> As Rex Tillerson has said, prior to leaving office, Trump is a moron.

9/2/19 Post contributed by: Marty Westerman- a friend of our blog.

Our nearly four years with the unprecedented candidate-President Drumpf-tRump-45, bring three movies to mind for me – The Producers, Sneakers (the original hacker movie) and Galaxy Quest (the Star Trek spoof J.J. Abrams loves).  You can get the day-by-day Presidency count from Brian Williams every night on his 11^th Hour MSNBC show – as of September 1, 2019, it’s 954 (excruciating) days.

The scene that provides my umbrella for this odyssey comes near the end of The Producers.  Zero Mostel’s character, producer Max Bialashtok, sits in the rubble of his theatre, looking skyward and asking, “I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast. Where did I go right?” 

Trump was the wrong candidate and is the wrong President for so many reasons:  misogyny & gaslighting; rich-boy entitlement, narcissism & white privilege; support for white supremacy, fascism; divisiveness & propagandizing; vengefulness, immigrant- and race-baiting; faux-patriotism & aiding America’s enemies; failed businesses & trade wars; climate change denial; personal and institutional disloyalty; dismissal of facts, opposing research & truth; epic dishonesty, religious indifference, and hatred of pet dogs. 

With all these negatives, he has become a catalyst for our time. Thanks to the dynamics of 45 he and his supporters, for all the wrong reasons, they have confronted us with all the “right” things the majority of Americans (the other 65-70% of us) must now address:

• #metoo, the roles of women in society & embedded misogyny;
• #blacklivesmatter, embedded U.S. racism (from today’s local neighborhoods back to the 1789 U.S. Constitution), police bias & responses to white supremacist riots;
• immigrants’ rights, the asylum process vs. “homeland security,” & U.S. Latin American policy (and international relations);
• news media false equivalencies: “balanced coverage” that makes chronic liars look equal to research, data and facts; #fakenews; & social media hacking;
• nepotism, emoluments, corrupt practices & accountability for public servants;
• undermining U.S. institutions, including courts, intelligence, investigative and policing services; and support and regulation agencies
• the dependably re-elected, legacy beneficiaries of political gerrymandering;
• money in politics, income disparities (& favoritism for the rich), and failures to apply federal anti-trust and state corporate charter regulatory laws, and
• governmental balance of powers, and the structure of the U.S. Constitution – including the continued efficacy of the Electoral College vs. popular votes, 2^nd Amendment, embedded racism, and whether or not the U.S. President and any other high-ranking official is governed by the law.

As much as I’d prefer Hilary, if she had become President, it’s unlikely the Democrats would have re-taken the U.S. House, nor won so many state and local offices, nor would so many Republican lawmakers now be resigning.  It’s unlikely that national revulsion at 45 would have brought all these “right” issues to a head.  Hilary would have been dogged by Republican hounds gnawing at her heels, yapping at & blocking her every move.  McConnell would not be known as Moscow Mitch, nor Graham as Leningrad Lindsey.

Looking ahead, I keep in mind the old warnings from Sneakers (1992) and Galaxy Quest (1999), for our future elections:

• Beware computer hacking – warns the villain Cosmo (Ben Kingsley) to the hero Martin (Robert Redford):  “The world isn’t run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money, it’s run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It’s all just electrons. … And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information.”
• Mind your history:  Guy (Sam Rockwell) snatches Gwen (Sigourny Weaver) back from walking into a trap, and barks:  “Don’t you watch the show?!”

Let’s appreciate how interesting are the times we live in.  And make sure we do the right things – for all the right (and/or even if for all the wrong) reasons

Protestor? Beat the crap out of him!

This is Trump talk at one of his rallies:

“Shoot migrants”, yells a trump rally attendee, and Trump actually responds:

“That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that stuff” (that is shooting migrants).

Analyze that to get a fuller picture of Trumps ‘ hidden brain process. Isn’t Trump saying, its ok to shoot a migrant, so long as you do it in the panhandle where you can, presumably, “get away with it”? (an area where Trump received 80% of the vote (ie-Trump country).

We have a president who believes it is also ok to do anything he likes, so long as it is marked with a single criteria: he can “get away with it.” And he thinks he can get away with anything, so long as he has his brown shirt supporters and politician backups on board. https://crooksandliars.com/2019/08/el-paso-shooters-manifesto-uses-trump-and

6/30/19:

Outward signs of intellectual decline are quite pronounced now in Trump, as the devolution of our culture continues. We have pointed to Trumps’ long term use of finisteride, and its devastating impact on brain health (see earlier post), which combined with the”know-it-all” trait found in narcissistic personality disorder, puts us all at code level red risk.

Donald Trump Stumped By Terms ‘Busing’ And Western ‘Liberalism’ At News Conference https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-busing-liberalism-g20-press-conference_n_5d17df7de4b082e5536a499d DOWNLOAD_HUFFPOST