Where Does Donald Trump Think This Is Going? That’s What I Want To Know…

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Thought experiment: you’re a Trump (chill — it gets easier after that). Yes, you’re a sociopath (so no worries about a guilty conscience) but you’re not entirely oblivious of reality. You see the walls closing in. You know the stone cold Truth of what you did and why: you’re a Trump.

You know who you compromised and how. You’re wily as hell. You’re a criminal. You’ve gotten away with being a criminal your whole goddamned life. Your whole family are criminals. It’s your brand.

You may not be the sharpest tack in the box (more like the dullest) but, to your credit, you’ve turned being a go-to money launderer for the Russian mob into a hail Mary shot at paying down every debt you have (and that’s a lot of goddamned debt). You’re the most successful schoolyard bully maybe of all time.

But even you know there are limits.

You know enough never to cross Vladimir Putin. Or Mohammed bin Salman. They’ve got receipts. Oh, boy, do they have receipts…

They say bark, bitch and you bark. You’re a Trump.

You know how the realpolitik is here because you’re sitting at the very middle of it all. You’re a lesser criminal playing with real criminals. You’re in waaaaaay over your bloated orange head. Your mental faculties, never great to begin with, are fading.

But — you’ve had an iron grip on this from the beginning. You have to sign off on everything — as always — even if you haven’t got a goddamned clue. You’re not just A Trump, You’re Donald Trump.

That’s the background.

Now the doors to the private residence close — you feel good that this time your private security detail (not those by-the-book Secret Service humps) swept it for mics and found everything that’d been planted. You can talk freely with those you trust: your blood.

You sit there — the Donald — surrounded by The Junior, The Feckless One, The Idiot (Eric) and My-Son-In-Law-The-Jew. In here, truth gets spoken. That doesn’t mean there aren’t lies and lying. That’s part of the Truth here. These are criminals in the midst of a vast criminal enterprise. Stock must be taken — especially now because the “Tower” is under heavy assault and it may not survive.

What does Donald say to them all — knowing what they know? He’s going to tell the boys he never stuck his dick in their sister? They know better. Donald knows they know better. You lie in THIS room at your peril (unless it’s “Oooh, daddy — you’re the best!”)

Then Donald, saying what he had to say, stops talking. The others start up. What do THEY say to each other?

What does one Trump tell another Trump if that other Trump is losing faith in the Big Scheme? Do the Trumps honestly believe this is survivable? Do they honestly think they can lie their way to safety as Washington’s professional diplomats come together to be the inside force that finally stops Trump’s presidency?

I really do want to know what Ivanka tells daddy about their collective future. Where does Ivanka think daddy’s grandchildren are going to grow up? Is Ivanka really feckless enough to not see how this ends for her? What goes through Eric’s mind, I wonder. Supposedly, Eric’s the least horrible of the bunch. He’s smarter than portrayed on SNL. As HE sees the walls closing in, does HE begin to think in terms of pure survival?

The Trumps didn’t commit one or two little crimes then land by all sorts of odd coincidence in the White House. The Trumps have committed treason.

To be fair, I’m sure “treason” never flashed before their eyes as they started down this road. Money flashed before their eyes. A Trump Tower Moscow which they coveted — that flashed before their eyes. Those things are what caused them to be traitors.

Whatever.

How, I truly wonder, do the Trumps think this psychotic side show on steroids will end? What’s their best case scenario?

Better yet — what’s their worst?

Tell me that story, daddy. I’m all ears…

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Dear News Media: Repeat After Me — “Both Sides Don’t Do It, Both Sides Don’t Do It, BOTH SIDES DON’T DO IT!!!”

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Maybe our news media’s problem is one of projection. They can’t walk & chew gum at the same time so they assume Democrats can’t and citizens can’t.

But, thing is, anyone who isn’t a journalist CAN do two things at once. Some of us can even hold two conflicting thoughts in our heads without our heads exploding.

Because our news media insists on seeing EVERYTHING through a political lens (even if the thing they’re looking at ISN’T political), they assume everyone DOES everything for political reasons. The reason Democrats have vehemently opposed Trump more than any other Republican in their lifetimes isn’t because he’s a Republican. It’s because he’s corrupt. It’s because he’s a racist. And a rapist. And a con man. And a criminal with a history of laundering Russian mob money. And a TRAITOR.

All of those are facts about Donald Trump. One could, being completely apolitical, object to Trump on each of those grounds. One could object to Trump on ALL of them — and STILL not be “political”.

It’s galling to be told your motive is one thing when it’s not that thing at all. It’s even more galling when the people insisting you’re being political hold a megaphone — as the MSM does.

Democrats object to Trump because he called Mexicans rapists. Because he boasts about grabbing pussies. Because he (clearly) lies on his taxes. Because he violated his oath of office the instant he took it. Because his relationship with Russia isn’t just “dodgy” or “suspect”, it’s flat out TREASONOUS.

Democrats object to Trump because he lies almost every time he opens his mouth. Democrats object to Trump because he treats the Constitution and The Rule Of Law like asswipe.

Not only don’t both sides “do” what Donald Trump is doing to America and our whole way of life — both sides don’t “approve” of it either. Because putting children in cages or profiting off our foreign policy or conspiring to murder journalists or calling the press “enemies of the people” etc etc etc is immoral and disgusting.

Insisting that the Democrats are prosecuting Trump for purely political reasons is insulting to every patriotic American. It takes a criminal’s framing of his crime and makes IT the norm. Those going after the criminal are suddenly the suspects. Every time the American press repeats anything Trump says without vetting the hell out of it first, they’re setting “Both Sides Do It” in concrete.

Bottom line — the MAJORITY of Americans didn’t vote for Trump and do not want Trumpism in any way, shape or form. Trump’s base is a fraction of the Republican party (who themselves are only 24% of the American electorate). The American news media is so far out of whack that they continue to insist that 16% of the electorate equals the 55% who (per Quinnipiac) want to see Trump impeached.

The American news media still insist that Trump “won” election 2016 fairly & squarely. That’s completely false of course. And if you don’t (or can’t) see election 2016 as stolen — and NOT representing the will of the American people — then the “both sides” you see doing it, aren’t the sides that are actually present — or doing it.

Dear America – We Have A Health INSURANCE System, Not A Health CARE System; They’re NOT The Same Thing

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Until we get the framing right, we’ll never fix the problem: our health CARE system is broken because it’s NOT a health CARE system. It’s a health INSURANCE system.

The first question anyone gets asked when they walk into any facility for health CARE isn’t “How can we fix you?”, it’s “How ya gonna pay for this?” Right off the bat, that’s ass backwards. The inmates are in full control of the asylum.

No other industrialized nation has a system like ours — where most Americans get their health INSURANCE (not care) through their employer. There’s a reason — and it’s not because we’re so clever and exceptional. It’s a historical anomaly that we’ve simply never dealt with, addressed or even admitted to.

Back during World War II, every available dollar was put toward the war effort. Rules prohibited companies from giving employees raises or raising salaries for new hires. Big companies, wanting to compete for the best employees, needed another incentive so they began offering free health care — well, they’d pay the insurance premiums.

Note — big companies were able to do it because they could afford (at first) to handle the additional admin and cost of running a health insurance program. As the war went on, more big companies offered the same health insurance benefit. Then the war ended… but the health insurance benefit didn’t — even though it should have.

After the war, all those big companies looked to get out of the health insurance business. They subcontracted out the work to the burgeoning health insurance industry to serve as the “gatekeepers” between workers and their health CARE. To keep costs down, the insurance companies eventually cut deals with doctors to get better rates. All very reasonable except that the insurance companies had now created EXCLUSIVITY where there wasn’t any.

Suddenly insurance companies could control which patients a doctor could see. And then they made their gatekeeping integral to the whole health CARE system itself.

Corporations — like health insurance companies — have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders (the preferred class, not the regular class of shareholders) first and foremost. They have NO actual responsibility to “patients”. The insurance company doesn’t actually care what happens to any patient. It’s in their interest to spend the least they can get away with on each patient while collecting the maximum amount of income from him/her.

Is universal single payer perfect? FFS, there’s no such thing as “perfect”. But at least it takes the FOR PROFIT gatekeepers out of the health CARE equation. There will still be gatekeepers for sure — government gatekeepers. But We The People can control how they keep the health care gates for us. We can’t do the same with a corporation.

It is even more absurd to run around all Chicken Little-like about Elizabeth Warren says she’d pay for her Medicare For All plan — without comparing it to either 1) what our current health INSURANCE system costs each & every one of us in cold, hard cash terms or 2) ever asking a Republican EVER what their “health care plans” cost or how THEY might get around to paying for it.

FFS – the Republicans pulled off a massively destructive (to the middle class) tax cut to the rich that they had no intention of every paying for — except by gutting social security and welfare.

America keeps getting tripped up by greed. Greed is what allows Big Pharma to charge extortionist prices for insulin when it’s inside America’s borders and reasonable prices everywhere else.

Greed never makes anyone smarter. It ain’t gonna cure anyone’s ills either.

Not Only Don’t Both Sides “Do It”, Both Sides Don’t Even APPROVE Of “It”

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Maybe our news media’s problem is one of projection. They can’t walk & chew gum at the same time so they assume Democrats can’t and citizens can’t.

But, thing is, anyone who isn’t a journalist CAN do two things at once. Some of us can even hold two conflicting thoughts in our heads without our heads exploding.

Because our news media insists on seeing EVERYTHING through a political lens (even if the thing they’re looking at ISN’T political), they assume everyone DOES everything for political reasons. The reason Democrats have vehemently opposed Trump more than any other Republican in their lifetimes isn’t because he’s a Republican. It’s because he’s corrupt. It’s because he’s a racist. And a rapist. And a con man. And a criminal with a history of laundering Russian mob money. And a TRAITOR.

All of those are facts about Donald Trump. One could, being completely apolitical, object to Trump on each of those grounds. One could object to Trump on ALL of them — and STILL not be “political”.

It’s galling to be told your motive is one thing when it’s not that thing at all. It’s even more galling when the people insisting you’re being political hold a megaphone — as the MSM does.

Democrats object to Trump because he called Mexicans rapists. Because he boasts about grabbing pussies. Because he (clearly) lies on his taxes. Because he violated his oath of office the instant he took it. Because his relationship with Russia isn’t just “dodgy” or “suspect”, it’s flat out TREASONOUS.

Democrats object to Trump because he lies almost every time he opens his mouth. Democrats object to Trump because he treats the Constitution and The Rule Of Law like asswipe.

Not only don’t both sides “do” what Donald Trump is doing to America and our whole way of life — both sides don’t “approve” of it either. Because putting children in cages or profiting off our foreign policy or conspiring to murder journalists or calling the press “enemies of the people” etc etc etc is immoral and disgusting.

Insisting that the Democrats are prosecuting Trump for purely political reasons is insulting to every patriotic American. It takes a criminal’s framing of his crime and makes IT the norm. Those going after the criminal are suddenly the suspects. Every time the American press repeats anything Trump says without vetting the hell out of it first, they’re setting “Both Sides Do It” in concrete.

Bottom line — the MAJORITY of Americans didn’t vote for Trump and do not want Trumpism in any way, shape or form. Trump’s base is a fraction of the Republican party (who themselves are only 24% of the American electorate). The American news media is so far out of whack that they continue to insist that 16% of the electorate equals the 55% who (per Quinnipiac) want to see Trump impeached.

The American news media still insist that Trump “won” election 2016 fairly & squarely. That’s completely false of course. And if you don’t (or can’t) see election 2016 as stolen — and NOT representing the will of the American people — then the “both sides” you see doing it, aren’t the sides that are actually present — or doing it.

What Did YOU Do In The CYBER War, Daddy?

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Anyone who thinks it takes bombs and bullets to win a war is an idiot doomed to lose every war he ever fights going forward.

Please — let’s not that idiot.

Call it asymetrical war, call it cyber war. Call it anything you like. Russia is waging it against us regardless of what we call it or even whether we acknowledge that we’re under attack.

For reference — the people living at Pearl Harbor had no idea the Japanese fleet was on its way — having declared war on America in general and on them specifically that day. You don’t have to know you’re under attack to “be” under attack.

The first thing we have to do — individually — is acknowledge what’s happening to us. Being a victim of childhood sexual assault, I know how easy it can be to go all “out of body” in the face of emotional trauma. Hell, I denied what happened to me for 45 years. Not for a second did it mean it didn’t happen to me.

It only meant that I was in denial about it.

We’re under attack. This is war — World War Three, in fact (we’re not the only country Russia is assaulting after all). We know that Putin created actual plans to attack us covertly. That he’s done it (and is still doing it) isn’t the shocker; it’s all the complicity on our side of the ledger that’s shocking. Trump is a given. He’s been involved with Russian mobsters and their money for decades.

How quickly so many Republicans succumbed to Trump — that’s the shocker. Between kompromat & campaign money (illegal cos it’s Russian), the Republicans must be guilty out the wazoo to judge by their loyalty to a man so obviously guilty of the highest crimes and misdemeanors.

It’s on us to fight back every day in evey way we can. Voting will be vital of course. But so is engaging with these pirates. Silence in the face of their crimes normalizes their crimes. Yeah, it’s a pain in the ass — and exhausting — having to keep up the righteous indignation. But every time we stop being righteously indignant, that’s another high crime we’re normalizing.

It’s the fact that we’re at war that turns Trump’s desperate need for cash into treason.

Make no mistake: this will get uglier than we can imagine. The republicans will refuse to own their betrayal to the bitter end.

They won’t like how that part of the Cyber War ends for them — in irons in a federal penitentiary for the rest of their lives. That’s if they’re lucky.

What If The Truth Is We CAN’T Handle “The Truth”?

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

A core question we each have to wrestle with: what’s our personal relationship with “The Truth”? You know what I mean — the TRUTH: the stuff we know about ourselves (being ourselves) that no one else could ever know or will ever know. The stone, cold TRUTH we all know down deep. Who we really are, what we really want, why we’re really miserable.

Now let’s talk about the Truth we’ll talk about.

We can all see the scene in our heads. Still — it’s so compelling — let’s watch it together:

Great speech. It perfectly encapsulates the yin-yang of what we wish it took to have order and what it really takes to have order.

The Truth, in sausage terms: no one ever walks away from a sausage factory feeling good about sausage.

A couple of cold, very hard Truths are staring us in the face as we all sit here: Donald Trump is a flat out traitor. That’s A Truth. Serious people loathe to even think the word “treason” have entertained the idea that Donald Trump isn’t some hyperbolic traitor, he’s a very real one. They’re not doing that because of politics. They’re doing it because of treason.

There’s a strange thing the news media does along these lines. In their need to be even-handed, letting their readers decide, they’ll give Trump the benefit of the doubt (still) that everything he does has some actual relationship to his being president — ignoring that he’s never, at any time during his presidency, acted “presidential”. Trump is always reported as if yesterday’s outrages, like those from the days before, never happened. He woke up this morning a normal potus doing normal potus things.

Except, of course, he didn’t. Still — of the three possibilities that could explain the past 3+ years — he’s completely innocent is one possibility. In the abstract.

Second possibility: He’s kinda guilty — some combination of bad intent and stupidity that explains away continuing acts of criminal behavior and obstruction of justice. From an odds point of view — you’d at least figure the explanation for everything could live here. In quasi-guilt.

But there is a third possibility — the one our MSM won’t ever go near — even though it’s very definitely a possibility, too: Donald Trump is completely guilty.

Let’s pretend this was a murder instead of treason. Let’s say Trump actually shot one of his supporters — just like he keeps promising to do.

We have Trump saying he could do it. We have the murder weapon. We have Trump’s bloated, orange fingerprints all over the weapon. We have a murder victim. We have everything we need to say a crime was committed. But our MSM would look at all the evidence and insist no one could know for sure if a crime was committed or even if the dead guy was really dead.

What’s wrong with the Truth?

That’s what every day feels like. Turn on the news — hear Trump’s latest treasonous behavior — hear the news media act as if Trump’s just a slightly unusual potus being potus in a slightly unusual way. No — that’s not it at all. He’s not unusual — he’s a criminal who didn’t “win” an election, he got Russia to steal it for him. Literally.

When Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson was called before the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee (August 22, 2017 — they were trying to undermine the Steele Dossier but failed), he described how Fusion, before getting too deep into the oppo work the conservative, Jebb Bush-supporting Washington Free Beacon had hired them to do, did its “due diligence”: they got ahold of every piece of publicly available material on Donald Trump — be it book, magazine, radio interview or TV appearance. They got it from Amazon, from used book stores and even from Amazon. What Fusion found there — in material anyone could get their hands on — convinced them that Trump had been laundering Russian mob money through his Atlantic City casinos. That, Simpson testified, is why Fusion sought out Chris Steele, former head of the Russia desk at Britain’s MI6.

The Truth has always stared at us with a moon face: Trump is a traitor. He’s a criminal. So’s the rest of his family. So’s the rest of his administration. How much criminality does one have to witness, read about or have rubbed in one’s nose before you’re allowed to fight back?

Okay — the Truth is: Donald Trump is a traitor who betrayed the nation. The Truth is without Russia’s direct assistance, Donald Trump is not POTUS, Hillary Clinton is. Let’s start there: Donald Trump is not now and never has been the legitimate POTUS. If it violates the Rule Of Law to cheat to become POTUS then Trump’s cheating disqualifies him.

If Trump cheated to become POTUS then he won nothing. Having not won the presidency, he was never authorized to 1) take the oath of office or 2) execute any part of his Constitutional because he wasn’t POTUS. Trump had no more right to pick judges than I do. He has no more right today. He’s not actually POTUS.

The Rule Of Law is pretty simple in its fundamentals: It either is or it isn’t. You can’t have 90% of the Rule of Law (what would the other 10% be — organized chaos?) just like you can’t have 90% of your integrity. Is v isn’t.

If the Rule Of Law IS then The Truth is even that much more important. It’s the one thing we should all be able to agree on.

America won’t like any of the Truth they’re about to hear about Donald Trump. It won’t get any better than it already is.

But I bet America handles the Truth about Trump just fine. It won’t make us happy — not one bit. But we’ll batten down the hatches. We’ll handle the Truth about Donald Trump just fine. For sure, We The People will handle the Truth far, far better than Trump will.

Integrity Is An All Or Nothing Proposition

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment
What Zero Integrity looks like — en masse

Nothing is funnier than a Republican drawing himself up, having just been asked a serious question about his integrity. He knits his brows, purses his lips and goes all “earnest” with his voice.

Mitch McConnell talking “patriotism” — having just lifted the sanctions punishing Oleg Deripaska for changing the outcome of election 2016, say. That’d be Mitch insisting he’d done something great for the people of Kentucky (while betraying them and everyone else in the country).

Your average Republican thinks THAT’S “Integrity”. Acting like you have it.

When you have no integrity, acting like you have it is as close to having integrity as you’re ever going to get.

What Republicans especially don’t seem to grasp — integrity while iron-clad at its core, is built of gossamer. It’s a soap bubble, easily punctured. And just like a soap bubble, once popped? It’s popped for good.

There’s a reason we don’t say things like “Ya know, that Kevin McCarthy — the GOP Leader — he may not have all his integrity, but 70%’s okay with me!” The moment Kevin slipped below 100%, that should have been the end of it. How can you trust someone almost completely but not completely? That means you DON’T trust them because even when you do, you really don’t.

That’s how integrity works. It is or it isn’t.

Can we all please, please, PLEASE agree? When it comes to integrity, if you still have an “R” next to your name? While Donald Trump’s a Republican? If you stand in any way, shape or form with him?

You can’t even spell “integrity”.