Tag: Donald Trump

I Know Who I See Staring Back At Me In A Mirror… What Does A Republican See?

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

At some point, unless you’ve removed every reflective surface from your house, you WILL have to see your own face reflected back at you. I don’t know about the rest of you (cos none of us will EVER be in a bathroom ALONE with anyone else) but when I look at myself in the mirror, I look right into my own eyes.

In those moments, I bore in on “me”.

I see those moments as me getting to talk to ME. It’s me having a chance — if I choose to take it — to speak directly to myself — to that box of thoughts and traits and wild imaginings that I think of as “me”.

Now, let’s be clear — we all lie to ourselves. Mostly we tell small lives to us about us. Mostly it’s because we want to be “better” than we are: better friends, better spouses, better parents, better at our jobs, better at spelling, better at sex, better at getting what we need (vs what we think we want). Telling ourselves little lies is a survival skill.

Except we know we’re lying to ourselves even as we do it. Because it’s us doing it. To us.

We know what we know. We know when we’re bullshitting ourselves about it, too. Except… we are capable of keeping secrets from ourselves. Hell — I “kept one” from myself for 45 years (that I was sexually molested twice when I was 14 by the spiritual director at my family’s synagogue). I knew it happened. It rippled through my life every day; hell, it was the reason I tried to kill myself. That secret.

A part of me always knew it was there, waiting to be dealt with one way or another.

I make it a point now — my mental health depends on it — to be as honest as I can with myself. Lying has proved it’s no good for me. Honesty with myself to myself is where good mental health lives. That’s what makes watching Republicans lie so compelling to me.

Donald Trump is a text book sociopath. He has no conscience to speak of. He’s not capable of being honest with himself; lying — even to himself — is how he rolls. That doesn’t excuse the lies for two seconds. Most Republicans are quite capable of discerning truth from bullshit; they’re NOT sociopaths. The only good explanation for how Republicans behave these days is “guilt”. Knowledge of guilt.

Bill Barr may be a hard core Christian shill but he’s not an ignoramus. He KNOWS empirically that the bullshit he spewed the other day to the Federalist Society (like the bullshit he spewed at Notre Dame a few weeks before that) is rubbish on steroids. When you say things that are demonstrably untrue, it’s not because you believe the opposite is true; you NEED the opposite to be true because you’re a goddamned liar, a thief or a criminal.

My bet is most Republicans don’t see anyone staring back at them. They see a physical body. They see a face. They even see eyes. But there’s nothing behind the eyes — except fear maybe.

We know damned well they’ll never see an honest person staring back.

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The More Perspective One Has, The More Criminal Trump & The GOP Look

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment
Would you buy a used “anything” from these pirates — least of all a government? We’re going to have to have OUR government fumigated after these bastards…

I suppose if you suddenly sprang into being right next to Donald Trump — so his essence, his aura, his version of the world was all that you knew — HIS version of the world might seem possible. But step outside the treasonous bubble of Trumpism — and a 2 X 4 of realism goes upside your head. The man’s lying even when he mutters “Hello”.

No one who isn’t already corrupted by Donald Trump thinks Trump’s view of the world, of events — of his own horrible family — reflects reality. Look at the “defense” the GOP’s “brain trust” banged together for the first day of formal, public impeachment hearings. There was no attempt whatsoever to argue the merits. There was no attempt to say “No, he didn’t do that” because everything’s been admitted to already.

If we approach the GOP’s behavior yesterday with a close up lens — as our Main Stream News Media likes to do — you get Trump’s defenders strategizing how to defend the indefensible. If you step back a few paces — using a slightly wider lens — you get get… well — if you COULD step back a few paces, you’d have done that a long, long time ago.

And if you had stepped back a few paces long before yesterday — if you had as much perspective as possible, say — you wouldn’t still be scratching your head wondering why Trump defends Putin the way he does and why the Republicans continue to defend Trump the way they do. Our MSM is YET to due their due diligence on Trump. They’ve never, most of them, done a top-to-bottom study of who Trump REALLY is so that when they report on him, they’re reporting on HIM and not some bullshit version of him. They’re not the same thing.

Back when the Republicans were doing everything they could to undermine the “integrity” of the Steele Dossier, they hauled Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, August 22, 2017. Fusion, Simpson testified, had first been hired by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website to do oppo research against Trump. Being pros, before they got going on the real assignment, they did their due diligence. They got their hands on piece of publicly available material on Donald Trump in existence. They combed Amazon and actual book stores. They got magazines and newspaper articles. They got tapes of radio shows and TV shows. They even went to the public library to find stuff.

What Fusion found while doing their due diligence — the scuttwork FFS — convinced them that Trump had been deeply involved with Russian mobsters for years. They saw clear indications that Trump had laundered untold millions of dollars of Russian mob money through his Atlantic City casinos (which kind of explained how/why they failed — and how/why that was the point). Simpson explained that, suspecting what these professional journalists now suspected, Fusion contacted Chris Steele, former head of MI6’s Russia desk, the Westerner with the best contacts inside Russia bar none.

Chris Steele then produced his “dossier” — the raw intelligence that he’d gathered.

Instead of telling any of THAT story, pretty much all of our MSM — not doing a lick of due diligence — slapped the word “unverified” on Steele’s work (losing all sight of WHY he was doing that work, answering WHAT question asked by WHOM). Imagine how much quicker we’d be to telling and understanding this story if all the “publicly available” perspective had been applied to the story from the beginning — the way Fusion GPS did…

Our media blocks itself from bringing perspective to any story because they start from the premise that “Both Sides Do It”. Regardless of what it is, bad or good, I suppose, “both sides do it”. Neither side has any particular reason — other than their tribal impulse toward one extreme or its diametric opposite. People do things “just because”. All information weighs exactly the same — because (in American journalistic parlance) “who’s to judge?” That’s why lies and empirical truth weigh the same in so much reporting. Too many American journalists think they’d be editorializing to assume the information they’re reporting is actually true.

If you report that Donald Trump is DEMONSTRABLY a racist one moment, he doesn’t stop being a racist the next when he claims NOT to be a racist.

Similarly, when Trump behaves like a traitor — when he does openly treasonous things (like betraying the Kurds where the Press could enumerate every single way Trump’s action served only one person: Putin) — he doesn’t stop being a traitor just because it’s time to report on election 2020. That’s why we’re now telling the Ukraine story, get it?

Trump thinks he’s gotten away with stealing election 2016 so why not finish gutting American Democracy by stealing election 2020 — and using IT to UNBLAME RUSSIA for stealing election 2016? If the American MSM had done its due diligence… ya see where I’m going?

Then — bad to worse — the MSM scratches its head wondering why the Republicans (in the face of so much horrible truth) continue to defend Trump when (look at yesterday) there’s literally NO DEFENSE — for actions that scream from the rooftops “WE’RE CRIMINAL!” Because they live in a “Both Sides Do It” universe where lies and truth weigh exactly the same, this clear evidence of obstruction of justice (rather than seeking justice — it’s not seeking Justice when, like Lindsey Graham, you refuse to look at evidence cos it’s all a “hoax”) gets reported like… like it’s NOT an actual criminal behavior.

Boom — just like that, a CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR gets normalized. Legitimized.

When you have no perspective and you allow yourself to “see the world” through the criminal’s eyes as if the criminal wasn’t a criminal, you get corrupted yourself. If you had an ounce of perspective, of course, you wouldn’t have gone there to begin with. You’d have known that criminals were trying to bamboozle you.

We are zooming toward a bunch of big, big reveals. When this goes to the Senate — whenever that happens — and the Senate refuses to convict on charges so simple and so clear, we will arrive at the place this battle needs to arrive at. Who are we as a country?

Are we the lawless, authoritarian 1850 hellhole of ignorance, racism & old tyme religion the Republicans want us to be? Or are we America?

I guess it depends on where you’re standing.

To Void Election 2016 Or Not To Void — THAT Is The Question (It Isn’t Really — VOID IT!)

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

In fairness, it’s hard to get one’s mind around what’s happening to us. Russia launched an aggressive intelligence operation against us and election 2016 that succeeded beyond its wildest hopes. They literally MADE Donald Trump president.

C’mon — take Russia out of the Trump equation and he doesn’t get through the primaries. Take Russia & Wikileaks off the table (so there’s no document dumping) and Trump’s “Pussy grabbing” finishes off what “Mexicans are rapists” should have. There’s no rescue, see?

No Russia, no Trump. Can we vote tally our way to a “smoking gun” that says “Hey, wait a minute, Trump lost the vote count in PA/MI/WI too!”? Of course not. But there’s circumstantial evidence out the wazoo starting with the 77,000 votes across three states that made the difference between Hillary Clinton becoming POTUS and Trump “winning” instead.

That’s three states for which Paul Manafort handed Oleg Deripaska proprietary polling data.

It’s so much simpler than we’re making it. The law says you cannot break the law to win an election. Therefore if you broke the law to win an election then you did not win. Donald Trump and the Republican Party BROKE THE LAW to win election 2016. They broke the law repeatedly. They took copious amounts of Russian money (by dubiously legal means now revealed as ILLEGAL) and even allowed Trump’s campaign to make a change the the GOP’s 2016 Party platform that’s now the subject of intense investigation — the betrayal of Ukraine.

Ukraine-gate is just the next chapter of Russia-gate. The fact that we have a next chapter is because we didn’t burn the book after finishing the last chapter. This is literally Trump brazenly trying to close the deal (and close the book on American Democracy). The Republican Party is desperate to help him succeed.

If, as part of our righting the Ship of State, we re-establish The Rule Of Law as “a thing”, then we need to abide by The Rule Of Law’s most basic tenet — it IS. It applies evenly and fairly to all, no exceptions.

Under The Rule Of Law, thieves do not ever get to keep what they stole. If it’s returnable, it gets returned. If restitution needs to be paid instead, it gets paid. The Republican Party stole election 2016 from the American People. We voted one way, the GOP (with Russia’s considerable help) created the illusion that another result happened. It didn’t.

Take Russia out of the equation — Trump loses. He loses badly. And so does every last bit of his legislative & judicial agenda (Mitch McConnell’s & the Heritage Foundation’s judicial agenda actually). If Donald Trump was never legitimately president then he never had the right to nominate anyone for anything — especially SCOTUS judges.

Hell, without the illegitimate presidency, Trump probably couldn’t get onto the White House grounds. The bloated orange jackal turd couldn’t even pass a basic background check, could he?

If I steal your car, that doesn’t make me its rightful owner — even if I sit outside your house at five in the morning and lay on the horn till you come outside so I can flash you the finger as I peel off in a hail of screeching tires and road grit. The car’s still yours.

The same goes for an election. We The People voted one way but got the result Russia wanted instead. That cannot stand.

We learned the hard way what happens when you don’t fix problems at the get-go. We should have killed slavery dead. We didn’t and like a zombie it has hungered for our brains ever since. We fought the Civil War over slavery. Because Andrew Johnson helped kill Restoration, we’re still fighting the Civil War. We’re still battling over slavery.

If we don’t void the stolen results of election 2016, we will head down the same terrible path — with the same terrible results. How can we possibly “agree” to let the stolen results of 2016 remain if we KNOW for a fact they don’t reflect the Will Of The People but, rather, the will of Moscow?

How can we possibly allow that to “be”? How can we allow the car thief to keep what he stole?

We can’t.

It really is that simple.

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…

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 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”.