Tag: Electoral College

It’s The Corruption, Stupid!

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

The “Ragin’ Cajun”, James Carville, coined “(It’s) The economy, stupid!” during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Why would people vote one way(for Bill Clinton) vs the other (for GW Bush)? Back then, in those heady, carefree days (relatively speaking), the economy was our biggest, baddest problem. Oh, the luxury of only having to deal with one mega-crisis at a time! Nowadays — in Donald Trump’s America, every day brings a whole new mega-crisis. Or it seems to. If we’d just pull the lens back as far as we can so we could see Donald Trump, the GOP, election 2016 and election 2020 with the widest possible perspective — we’d see that, really, just like in 1992, we’re only facing ONE mega-crisis: Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party was the GOP’s final and total surrender to the corruption that’s been stalking it… well, forever.

The Republican Party prides itself on being the Big Money Party. Anyone in class today who thinks money doesn’t corrupt? Anyone who doesn’t think that the more money there is the more likely corruption there is? Good. Everyone’s a realist then. That helps.

Politicians and the money that owns them rely on corruption to have their way because relying on the majority of voters to vote for their ideas is pointless. The majority of Americans want the OPPPOSITE of what corrupt Republicans want. That’s why the majority voted the way it did in 2016 and 2020. Let’s stop pretending that the Electoral College reflects anything other than how slavery would vote. In 2016, the Republican Party managed to use both slavery’s vote and a silent vote from Russia to overcome the majority’s will. When you factor in the fact that Russia is and has been waging CYBER WAR against us, you can only conclude that Republicans were SO desperate to win that they even resorted to TREASON.

We The People felt corruption’s grip on us the instant 2016 was called for Trump. Democrats felt (rightfully) cheated of the result THEY’D WON in 2000 when Antonin Scalia stepped in and STOPPED the vote counting in Florida, crafting a mountain of bullshit into an argument that completely contradicted the very originalism he’s been selling from the trunk of his car like hot merchandise. Bush v Gore is the picture portrait of bullshit. Al Gore didn’t concede because he thought he lost to W. He conceded for the good of the country.

In retrospect, OY!

Corruption got us again. It caused us to make a terrible decision; we chose appeasement. Compromise. But, while WE compromised with corruption, corruption did not compromise with us. It simply caused us to NORMALIZE that much more corruption. It caused us to grow that much more cynical about ourselves and our democracy. Want to know why so many Americans went into the streets the moment it became a fact that Joe Biden was President-Elect? Because we’re sick to death of Donald Trump and the corruption he imposed onto our lives.

Remember: we did not vote for Trump. We voted against him. We voted against what he’s doing to us, to our Allies, to the planet.

Our news media needs to stop framing the Donald Trump story from corruption’s point of view as if corruption was just “another way of doing business”. It’s only “another way” if we let it be. If we put our collective foot down every time corruption reared its ugly head, corruption would quickly learn — don’t rear your ugly head (it could get stepped on)! But, when you indulge the boy who cries wolf every time he falsely cries wolf (without ever making him pay a price for doing it), he will cry wolf every chance he gets. If our news media would stop giving credence to the boy crying wolf — if they’d see him for what he is (a fraud) — maybe they’d turn their attention to more important parts of the story.

Like the fact that he’s a traitor.

There’s A Great Moral Reckoning Coming — And I Can’t Hardly Wait!

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

It’s not a matter of “if”. It’s a matter of “when”: a Great Moral Reckoning is coming — and the entire Republican Party is going to hate it.

Good.

Remember back to election night 2016? Remember how the evening began to feel — especially when it became apparent that Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were landing in the Trump column? It didn’t feel like we’d “lost”. It felt distinctly like something was “taken”. It wasn’t our expectations that were dashed — it was our sense of fairness. The Comey Letter plus Russian disinformation — landing as they did WHILE EARLY VOTING WAS HAPPENING — had a profound effect on the election’s outcome.

In the end, of course, the Comey Letter was bullshit. The investigation wasn’t being re-opened; the files in question were all old. Several “rogue agents” in the FBI’s NYC bureau — all fans of the Breitbart published book Clinton Cash — had dragged their heels for months, refusing to examine the files on Anthony Weiner’s computer. They deliberately waited until October — just so they could get the news media buzzing again about “her emails”. Of course, that was after a whole campaign season filled with cynicism, lies and the news media insisting that both sides were “doing it”.

No, both sides were not committing treason to win the election.

America has been due a Great Moral Reckoning since its inception. “All men are created equal” and slavery are mutually exclusive propositions. There are no compromises between the two. It’s a tug of war where only one side can win. Up until today, Slavery has continued to pin “All men are created equal” to the mat. That is finally changing.

The Electoral College is a vestige of slavery. It’s been a long time since a Republican became president because he won the popular vote. They now rely on the Electoral College to keep them — a minority — in power. They rely on a relic of slavery to keep slavery alive.

The Republicans have always portrayed themselves as the “moral party” — pointing to their piety as proof. Their piety is horse shit. So’s their “morality”.

The irony? The “moral party” — especially its religious wing — are the ones who most fear a Great Moral Reckoning. That’s because they’ll have the most to lose from it.

America must finally confront the racism that we built into our democracy. We have to own it. Slavery is, above all, stolen labor. That’s the whole point of having a slave: they work for you for free. You may have to house them and clothe them and feed them — so they’ll be able to work for you whenever you need them — but you don’t have to house, clothe or feed them well. The point is you’re not paying them — and that means you’re saving a fortune entirely at their expense.

Stolen labor is theft. It undermines not just the people whose labor is being stolen but all labor — because when it goes unpunished (as it almost always does), it encourages more stolen labor. I shouldn’t have to say this: stolen labor is immoral. To benefit from stolen labor is immoral. To profit from it — even more immoral.

Once we’ve owned our thievery, we can begin to fix the future. We can change our emphasis from making the rich richer to raising all boats. Real morality flows from equality. What’s moral is what’s most equal and what benefits the most people without harming anyone.

America’s women — especially Black women — are already driving us away from corruption and toward the “come to Jesus” moment we desperately need. When this is all done and dusted, America will owe its Black women more than a “thank you”. We’ll owe Black men, too. But Black women will have been made to bear the additional burden of sexism. We’ll owe Black women our deep, abiding, permanent respect — which we owed them all along.

Despite this country treating Black women callously in every way, Black women have kept the flame of American democratic principles alive. Though they’ve never benefited from the level playing field promised in our foundational documents — Life, Liberty, The Pursuit Of Happiness — they’ve demonstrated via their tenacity how the rest of us should feel about our democracy. Black women got it a long, long time ago. So did Black men of course. America’s founding ideals are worth fighting and dying for.

Note: while it’s understandable we might have to fight outside forces from time to time to protect our democratic principles, we should NEVER have to fight inside forces.

While one side perpetually plays the moral indignation card, it’s the other side that perpetually feels actual moral indignation — because of the first side’s relentless immorality. Our news media fails to see it because they’re convinced “both sides do it” while, in point of fact, both sides don’t.

Both sides don’t suppress the other side’s voters, for example. Both sides don’t commit treason in order to win elections. Both sides don’t relentlessly obstruct oversight or election security. One side does this — and for specific (political) reasons. How, I wonder, will our news media explain itself when we come to the understanding that, no, Donald Trump did not “win” election in 2016, he STOLE the election. Cheating to win does not equal winning. It can NEVER equal winning.

That’s something our news media will have to learn the hard way — via its own Great Moral Reckoning.

What If Donald Trump Didn’t “Win” The Electoral College In 2016 — As In, What If Russia Won It FOR Him?

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment
Donald Trump has a special kind of smile for “the boss” — Vladimir Putin

The Electoral College was the active part of the racism that our Constitution memorialized — one of its deep flaws. It compromised with evil — with slavery — and no compromise with evil ever turns out well for the compromiser. Evil always wins because, the fact is, you can’t compromise with evil.

Russia understands our flaws and understands how to exploit them — as they did in 2016. They also understand how easily Americans can be compromised with a little cold, hard cash. They understand that, for all our high ideals, plenty of Americans are deeply cynical. They also understand as PT Barnum did — no one will ever go broke underestimating the taste of the American public. They saw the potential for havoc in Donald Trump and they exploited every last bit of that potential.

Volume Five of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the 2016 election — the counter-intel part of the investigation — concluded: Russia actively sought to make Trump POTUS. They concluded that Trump 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort handing Russian oligarch & Russian Military Intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik proprietary polling data about Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan was a threat to our national security in and of itself. We haven’t officially investigated yet — at all — how Russian Military Intelligence took that polling data, weaponized it and turned it on individual voters in those states. We know how things turned out in PA/WI/MI. Trump won those three blue states by a combined 77,000 votes (out of tens of millions!)

But here’s the thing — and this is strictly according to the rule of law — that’s not legal. The handing off of the polling data right off the bat — it was illegal. It was treasonous, too. Its intent was treasonous — to allow a hostile foreign power to wage cyber war against American citizens. Cyber war is war. If the Russians shut down our power grid today (something not impossible), we’d sue for peace tomorrow, beaten without a shot ever being fired.

Anyone who thinks bombs and bullets will win future wars is an idiot doomed to lose every war they ever fight going forward.

Russia, smart as it is, probably didn’t game us — game the EC — all by itself. They had plenty of help from within the Trump campaign. And the Trump campaign, though it didn’t care much about the RNC, cared about the GOP’s money. Way behind the scenes, Mitch McConnell was orchestrating things. He’d been managing the Koch Brothers Washington, DC agenda — obstructing legislation, hijacking the judiciary by denying Obama so much as hearings for judicial nominations including Merrick Garland’s SCOTUS seat. The Mercers, via their company Cambridge Analytica were assisting Trump in other nefarious ways. At some point the RW money hitched their entire wagon to Trump, knowing his relationship with Russia.

The RW money — my bet — helped focus Russia’s efforts to subvert the election (that’s subvert the will of the American people) by pointing to states they had to have and had a remote chance of stealing. The propaganda war worked brilliantly. Trump actively called for Russia to help him win. Russia did — and we let it happen right in front of us. The disinformation — including the Comey Letter, dropped 10 days before the election — softened Hillary Clinton’s support especially among Black voters.

Do not underestimate the impact that had on the election’s results. With the polling as their guide, the Russians saw an opening. The propaganda put the race in PA/MI/WI (and probably MN) close enough that an attack on voting machines in those states became a viable way to finish stealing the election’s outcome. No one has ever done any forensics whatsoever on the voting machines, their electronic components and (most importantly) those electronic components accessible to any sort of remote impact — like a cell phone connection or the internet. We’re starting to get wise though to how hackable voting machines are.

It’s not just possible, it’s likely that Trump & the GOP knowingly stole election 2016. That is, they reversed the outcome most Americans voted for in favor of the outcome they — and their Russian co-conspirators — wanted. That means they did not win in 2016. That means that everything that’s flowed from their win — all the legislation, all the degradation of our governmental systems, all the lifetime judges — is the product of a crime. The rule of law says you can’t cheat to become president — especially if that cheating is treasonous.

Donald Trump has never been legitimate president of the United States. Nothing he did or is doing has the authority required to actually do it because the authority flows from us — We The People. If we do not grant it, you do not have it and we did not grant that authority to Donald Trump. He took it. It’s not the same thing.

Cheating can never equal winning. That’s how the rule of law sees it: if you cheat to win, you cannot “win”. Your “win” becomes void the instant you cheat in order to nab it.

We accept that Trump lost the popular vote (if we added in all the HRC votes Trump & Russia suppressed, I bet he would have lost by a shit-ton more). We will, in time, accept that without Russia’s direct interference in a free and fair election, Trump also would have lost the EC.

In other words: Trump was indeed NEVER the legitimate president of the United States.

We will have to deal with that fact, too. The rule of law will insist. Nothing an illegitimate POTUS did can stand. How can it? To let anything Trump did stand would be to reward criminality & treason. It would tell future criminals & traitors that regardless of what happened to them, their treachery would stand.

That’s ludicrous — and it flies in the face of the rule of law.

The rule of law will win the day. It will reassert itself and we will go back to enforcing it — except this time, we’ll enforce it equally. The first people to feel the rule of law’s might will be Donald Trump and every single Republican who collaborated with him or enabled him in any way.

Trump’s illegitimacy will bite him in his bloated orange ass. It will completely obliterate the Republican Party. It will also be the end of the Electoral College and — the biggest hope of all — slavery. Until we remove every vestige of slavery from the Constitution — including the EC that made it electorally viable — we will continue to live with slavery.

Better days are coming. America can and will live up to its ideals. But, first we need to take care of some old business — the theft of election 2016’s actual outcome.

How WOULD America Act If Trump COULD Finish His Authoritarian Coup D’Etat?

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

We are living through the most jaw-dropping story no writer could possibly write (and get away with). But the rules of storytelling still apply — because storytelling rules are based on how human beings behave. When storytellers get human beings wrong? The people listening to their stories bail. The stories no longer make sense because “nobody acts like that”.

That Republicans backed Trump and Russia (knowing that Trump himself was backed by Russia) would seem strange until you see Republicans in their proper context: a shrinking demographic desperately trying to hang onto political power. Their history of suppressing Democratic voters speaks volumes — the modern GOP has never been “into” actual representative government. That’s why they gerrymander districts. One doesn’t gerrymander so as to better administer to the will of the people, one does it to circumvent their will.

As Donald Trump himself said out loud — when more Americans vote, it’s bad for Republicans. Right — because when more Americans vote, they vote for Democrats — who represent how those Americans want to be governed.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by at least 3,000,000 votes. Without the massive voter suppression aimed at HRC’s voters? That number’s bigger. By a lot. And I will believe Donald Trump won the Electoral College votes of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin & Michigan in 2016 fairly and squarely as soon as we’ve done some real, thorough and serious forensics on both machines (which were all susceptible to hacking) and the impact of Russian propaganda efforts in those states. Remember — we know already that Trump’s 2016 campaign manager handed Konstantin Kilimnik (he of the GRU — Russian Military Intelligence) proprietary polling data from four states (PA/WI/MI and Minnesota) which Russia turned into personalized Facebook ads that turned up on the personal Facebook pages of African American voters in those four states. Think propaganda doesn’t work? Then why do people & countries spend so much money on it?

It’s advertising. It works.

While Americans are slow to anger — it took three-and-a-half years (plus the 400 years before it) for white people to finally get it that enslaving black people is morally repugnant even if all you do is accept it — once we get angry, we stay angry. At least for a while. How long that while will be?

That’s the Undiscovered Country. Americans have never been “occupied” by a hostile foreign power — not since the Civil War anyway. When it happened then? It pissed Americans off. The South hated it when the North invaded and the North hated it when the South pushed as far North as Gettysburg. While the countries of Europe have a long history of being invaded, conquered and occupied (Except for Switzerland maybe) across a thousand years, America (a very new country by comparison) has no such history.

That matters. People in Belgium and parts of France have been run over by Germans or Prussians for hundreds of years. WWI and WWII weren’t unique experiences. The rest of Europe routinely invaded itself or, going back even further, was accustomed to being invaded by Huns or other hostile tribes from beyond the Rubicon.

Americans are used to being the invaders. We DO the conquering, not the other way around. It’s part of our mindset. It’s how we think of ourselves. Which means that what Donald Trump & Bill Barr are trying to pull off in Portland (and now Chicago, Kansas City and who knows what other cities) will come up against not just the peaceful protesters in the street but the idea in their heads that Americans do not get invaded or occupied.

Tear-gassing moms will not convince them otherwise. As happened in Portland — more moms turned out the next night. And more moms after that.

Trump has no choice BUT to try and finish the soft coup d’etat he and the GOP pulled off with extensive Russian help in 2016. In no way did Trump “win” the presidency freely or fairly. We don’t know yet how many Republicans knew this even as they ran for office themselves in 2016, but we do know that PLENTY OF THEM KNEW. “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump” is how current GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy put it as he entered a room filled with Republican muckety-mucks. Then Speaker Of The House Paul Ryan told everyone there they weren’t going to talk about that fact.

Note — Paul Ryan didn’t reply “What? Are you sure about that, Kev’? Quick, somebody, get the FBI on the phone — we have a problem!” No, instead Paul Ryan replied: “No leaks. . . . This is how we know we’re a real family here.”

The protesting in Portland has gone on for more than 50 days straight. If Trump tries to put his foot on New York City’s neck — or Chicago’s — or Albuquerque’s — or Oakland’s — or anywhere, he’ll find not just resistance but a citizenry ready to take him on. Even the Republicans see our handwriting on their wall. That’s the handwriting of We The People. The polling indicates no just an electoral blowout coming for the Republican Party but near electoral obliteration.

Even the Republicans who survive the maelstrom will still have to deal with a minimized presence, a wretched brand and an increasingly marginized base that will have been significantly culled by the coronavirus (and their refusal to take it seriously). They will have to deal with an ongoing series of trials that will spell out in graphic detail the extent of Republican corruption. Every bit of regressive legislation they try to push will die on the vine while more and more of their co-conspirators get sent off to prison for the rest of their lives. In the end, even those last few “proud Republicans” will have to re-brand.

The word “Republican” will have been that damaged that they’ll have no choice if they want to have any say whatsoever in our democratic process.

That’s how America will react when Trump attempts to put his jack boot upon us. It will be messy. Trump will do it (he has no choice) and we will not just resist but fight him off completely. We, too, have no choice.

It comes down to this. Trump has it right about what happens when too many Americans get involved in politics. They at least lean Democratic. Democrats are very different from Republicans. For one thing, we do not ever march in lockstep — ideologically. We’re still the unmanageable “rabble” Will Rogers was thinking of when he said “I’m not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat”.

But threaten our rights and we get remarkably organized. Trump and his Republican co-conspirators will do everything they can to get away with this (“this” being election fraud, obstruction of justice and treason). They have no choice. The instant Trump stops being POTUS (and stops being protected by that ludicrous DoJ rule that supposedly says you can’t indict a sitting president), his legal problems will begin in earnest. He will never go another day of his life where he isn’t in legal trouble — or civil. The same goes for pretty much every single Republican.

“See something, say something” is how conspiracy works. Except, with conspirators, it’s “See something, say nothing“. That’s what makes them co-conspirators. Even if you suspect illegal shit is going on? You are obligated to say something otherwise it forces us to ask “why?” WHY did you not say anything about the crimes you suspected were happening?

Trump will not succeed. The Republican Party will not succeed. The best they can hope for is that 30% of the country backs them. Even among that 30%, it’s a pretty small number who will be willing to die for the Republican Party — especially as its callousness puts more Americans in desperate financial straits and the coronavirus’ deadly path.

Know who Trump’s going up against? This little girl. This fierce little girl.

See that fire in her eyes? That’s what’s burning inside a growing number of Americans who don’t want America to go back to how it was.

We want America to finally become the thing it always should have been.

Of Course Trump’s Not Prepared To Deal With Coronavirus — He Never Planned To Be President!

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Donald Trump & his Republican co-conspirators remind us every day: elections have consequences; stolen elections have even worse ones.

Donald Trump is not now nor has he ever been the legitimate POTUS. Painful as it may be, let’s revisit election night 2016.

What made a shocking night all the more perplexing was that even Trump and his campaign were so utterly surprised by the results — in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — and then the Electoral College. 77,000 votes across three states.

Paul Manafort notoriously handed Oleg Deripaska proprietary polling data for 4 states: Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. That act, in and of itself, was illegal — receiving something of value from a foreign interest in an American election. The fact that that foreign interest was Russia — and Russia was actively engaged in a cyber war against us makes this all treason on steroids. No one working with Russia thought “But, hey — Russia just wants what’s best for America”. Even without knowing that Putin literally “had a plan for that” — for infiltrating and undermining us especially via our elections. Their short long-term goal — corrupt and undermine all American elections so as to permanently pervert our democracy. For shits n giggles they pushed Trump.

Enough Americans were so far beyond hope that Trump became viable. Then it came down to gaming the Electoral College. Our system was INVENTED to be gamed — by slavers. There’s no genius in using the EC to subvert the will of the majority. There’s only naked cynicism, corruption and a will to impose permanent minority rule on the majority.

July 21, 2016 – Washington, District of Columbia, U.S. – UNITED District of ColumbiaS – JULY 12: GOP nominee Donald Trump, flanked from left by campaign manager Paul Manafort, and daughter Ivanka Trump, checks the podium early Thursday afternoon in preparation for accepting the GOP nomination to be President at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio on Thursday July 21, 2016. (File Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call) (Credit Image: © Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA Press)

The truth is we don’t know yet how profoundly Manafort’s gift impacted the outcomes in PA/WI/MI. We don’t know for a fact how many African American voters were dissuaded by the personalized Facebook ads that turned up on their Facebook pages every day — ads based on that proprietary polling data that was now weaponized into propaganda, misinformation and disinformation.

If the Rule Of Law was back in force, we’d have to draw the line at Zero Tolerance. In other words, if just ONE African American voter stayed home because of what Paul Manafort did? That’s election fraud — right there. As we know, one vote can change an election’s outcome. If we don’t know how many other African American voters were similarly dissuaded from carrying out their right to vote, then we cannot say how much voter fraud occurred other than “it happened”.

The Rule Of Law says it can’t happen. Therefore any and all voter fraud has the same meaning. It’s illegal. Now let’s be real. It wasn’t just one African American voter. It was lots. And those Facebook ads weren’t the only game being played. Let’s be really real: the Trump campaign wasn’t just in bed with Russia, the Trump campaign was Russia’s sex slave — chained to a wall in the Kremlin basement — and loving it.

Lots of people bitched about Michael Wolff and his book “Fire and Fury: Inside Trump’s White House”, but no one’s contradicted what Wolff wrote. Per Newsweek: “A week before the election, Trump was sure he would lose the presidency. But still, according to Wolff’s book, he told Ailes that it was “bigger than I ever dreamed of. I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.”

This is from New York Magazine’s excerpt of Wolff’s book (in their Intelligencer section):

“Not only would Trump not be president, almost everyone in the campaign agreed, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.”

It was as simple as THIS —

“Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his own business deals and real-estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he? Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn’t become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning.”

Which is why THIS —

Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears — and not of joy.

And then THIS —

There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump.

Becoming POTUS was not the point of the exercise. Creating Trump TV & more, bigger, better branding opportunities were.

But, once Trump won — once he realized what Vladimir Putin had done for him — he assumed the mantle of tin pot dictator. That’s tin pot dictator on a very short leash — about the length of that tin pot dictator’s ugly, badly-made, badly-tied tie.

Repeat — no one’s ever contradicted anything Michael Wolff said in his book. Liars denying a thing happened carries zero weight.

Every second that we refuse to put this on the table — own it all right goddamned now because pathogens like coronavirus don’t care about politics. We need full transparency right now. And once transparency begins for coronavirus? There’ll be no stopping it.

Suddenly all the other secrets Trump World has managed to hold onto will begin exploding into the light.

I blogged here about the similarities between HG Wells’ “War Of The Worlds” and our current situation — where a lowly pathogen could be the thing to take out a monster we mere Earthlings couldn’t lay a glove on. Even pundits who always get things wrong got this one right: at some point, a crisis will happen that Trump is ill-prepared to deal with.

All Trump’s other chaos has started with Trump and his innate corruption. He’s always been able to moderate the amount of insanity. He’s always been able to switch us to another outrage just as our outrage from the previous nonsense was waning. But, like a natural disaster, Trump can’t control coronavirus.

He got away with botching our response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. After all, Puerto Rico’s off shore. And it’s mostly brown people.

Coronavirus could come for any one of us. We’ll have as much skin in the game as we do coronavirus in our lungs and nasal passages. And if Donald Trump’s ineptitude, incompetence & corruption had anything to do with that (spoiler alert — it DID!), he may yet hold onto his most hard core devotees, but their numbers will be smaller than ever — and shrinking probably because they’re too damned stupid to protect themselves.

Trump may indeed have been able to shoot people on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single voter. He may NOT be able to infect people with coronavirus on Fifth Avenue and get away with that.

Do Americans Love False Narratives More Than They Love Democracy?

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

We’ve all had a friend — maybe it’s been us — who loved the wrong person too much. Everyone else but that friend could see from every angle how disastrous their love was and was going to be. But that friend persisted. They had created a false narrative inside their heads that love — theirs in particular — would overcome all obstacles and solve all problems.

They were wrong, weren’t they? That’s how false narratives work. You buy, they fail to deliver. But you keep buying regardless…

Elizabeth Warren — it’s pretty much agreed upon — was the best Democratic candidate still running when she dropped out of the race this week. She was the most complete. That’s after running alongside a host of strong women candidates (that does not include Tulsi Gabbard). But, we’re telling ourselves, voters were afraid of Warren’s “electability”. They feared that a woman couldn’t stand up to mean old Donald Trump.

There’s a shit-ton wrong with that. And every last bit of it flows from the fact that it’s a completely false narrative.

FALSE NARRATIVE #1: A WOMAN CANNOT BEAT DONALD TRUMP

Hillary Clinton got – at a minimum – 3 million more popular votes than Donald Trump got. That doesn’t include all the Democratic votes Republican efforts successfully suppressed. It doesn’t include all the Democratic voters (many African American) whose Facebook pages were barraged with weaponized ads created by Russia’s GRU (its Defense Intelligence Agency) based on proprietary polling data Paul Manafort gave Oleg Deripaska. It doesn’t include any possible corruption of voting machines and altered results.

As we’re learning the hard way, connecting a voting machine to the internet is an invitation to that machine getting hacked. And hacking them is simple. The companies who make voting machines are almost entirely “Republican” owned. They have resisted hand-marked paper ballots in favor of electronic voting systems with no possible way to check them for accuracy — while being entirely open to hacking.

A woman has already beaten Donald Trump at the polls. Hillary Clinton, I betcha we realize, was literally ROBBED of her presidency. We The People were robbed of it too. It’s an entirely false narrative to say election 2016 was “free & fair”. It’s an entirely false narrative to say Russia didn’t impact the election’s result.

It’s an entirely false narrative to say Donald Trump is a “legitimate potus”…

FALSE NARRATIVE #2: DONALD TRUMP IS THE LEGITIMATE POTUS

If the Rule Of Law had been fully functional in 2016, Donald Trump would not be president today. The Rule Of Law says pretty explicitly: you are not allowed to ask a foreign power to help you win the presidency. You aren’t allowed to accept help if they offer it. You aren’t allowed to accept foreign money into your campaign coffers.

And you aren’t allowed to conspire wtih a hostile foreign country who’s declared a cyber war on us.

Do any of those things — so says the Rule Of Law — and you cannot be president. Donald Trump & the Republican Party did ALL OF THOSE THINGS to help Trump become POTUS. Recognizing the demographic dead end staring them in the face, the Republican money cynically threw their lot in with Trump & Russia. They saw a direct route to permanent minority rule and they took it.

The Republican money has always known what it was doing — and why. Mitch McConnell knows better than anyone how illegitimate Trump’s presidency is.

Being illegitimate means Trump has never had the actual authority to do anything legitimate POTUSes do — suggest legislation, hire a cabinet, nominate lifetime judges to lifetime seats. Being illegitimate means Trump’s agenda is equally illegitimate — We The People did not vote for it; in fact, we voted for the exact opposite.

Let’s be real — what the Republicans pulled off in 2016 (with Russia’s direct assistance) was a soft coup d’etat. They deliberately conspired to change the outcome of the election for their own political benefit — never mind that their benefit and agenda were the diametric opposite of what The American Electorate actually voted for.

The Republican Party has busted a cap in the Rule Of Law’s head. They aren’t just ignoring it, they’re pissing on the corpse just to be assholes.

FALSE NARRATIVE #3: THERE’S NOTHING WE CAN DO TO STOP WHAT THE REPUBLICANS ARE DOING

This is the craziest part of the false narrative — the normalization of illegal, immoral behavior to such an extent that we believe it IS the new normal. For starters, regular Americans would have a better shot at standing up to the Trumpian false narrative if the damned news media would stand up to it.

Ordinary people like us don’t have any sort of megaphone beyond social media and blogs like this. We don’t invent the narrative and we certainly don’t broadcast it. If the news media had added information about Donald Trump instead of returning every day to a kind of “square one” where they shrug off the latest Trumpian outrages as a new “new normal”. We should have been at “hair on fire” status on the day Trump both took his oath of office and blatantly violated it at the very same instant.

That wasn’t a good sign.

But our press sold us a false narrative: this is normal now. This is how it is. Get used to it…

America’s always had a thing for false narratives. Think of all the wacky, new-fangled religions that have been invented in America, by Americans. Mormonism & Scientology both demand that their believers buy into some pretty ridiculous stuff. That’s how all religion works. Want to be in the club? Here’s the list of false narratives you need to accept first.

Americans are perfectly happy to vote for a woman as POTUS. We’ve already done it. It’s a false narrative to say that we haven’t.

My Sexual Assault Survivor Spidey Senses Are Tingling Like Crazy: What The GOP Is Doing To America Is Exactly Like A Sexual Assault

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

No one really “recovers” from being sexually assaulted. You can live with it, of course. You can make a kind of uneasy peace with it. But you can never accept that it happened to you.

The disease that comes with being sexually assaulted is believing that you deserved it. That’s what keeps you silent. In my case, I kept it so silent that I almost forgot WHY I had come to believe later in life that every bad thing that happened to me was my fault. I still believed then that being sexually assaulted was my fault.

It wasn’t of course. I was 14. The man who assaulted me — twice — was the religious director at the synagogue where my family belonged. The only thing I did “wrong” was not report him after he assaulted me that first time. But, like lots of victims, I began to question myself. I even questioned whether the assault had actually happened. It was surreal — a grown man rubbing his erect penis between my ass cheeks — through our clothes (he kept his underpants on, ya could say!) while supposedly coaching me on how to perform a haftorah at a Saturday morning Shabbat service. How could those two things go together?

I said nothing after it. That meant that when it happened again to me — when I again allowed myself to be in the same place at the same time as my sexual assaulter — all alone with him — it must have been my fault. Yehuda (that was his first name — he’s died since) knew that I hadn’t told anyone. He wasn’t in jail.

And since I was back — it obviously meant I’d say nothing this time too. I’d keep our secret. The moment that second sexual assault began, I was done. I was deep in both a hurt locker & a self-blame locker. Self-loathing was a natural outgrowth. Mine came within literal inches of killing me.

In getting better — and I am getting better — I have learned that it’s important to see things for what they REALLY are. Yehuda was a criminal perpetrating a crime upon 14 year old me. I was both a victim of sexual assault and a survivor. I have carried the scars with me since it happened. That’s over 45 years. I think we can safely say now that my sexual assault is part of my architecture.

I know with terrible certainty what those feelings are — when that pricking starts on the back of your neck. What I wake up feeling every day — even more so while the Senate Republicans sexually assault the Truth with abandon — is exactly what I felt the second time Yehuda stood behind me and rubbed his erect adult penis between my 14 year old ass cheeks. We are being assaulted.

Sexual assault isn’t “sex” the same way rape isn’t “sex”. It’s a crime of violence committed using sexual means. It’s a man using his penis as a weapon. It’s about power — his over you.

That is exactly what the whole Republican Party is doing to America, to The Rule Of Law, to the Constitution and to every single American who voted against this — in other words THE MAJORITY OF AMERICANS.

Don’t give that Electoral College nonsense. Yeah, yeah — Trump, the GOP & Russia gamed our system perfectly. They even told us (focus on PA/WI/MI) to win. Not because they intended to win more votes there but because they knew Russia was going to cheat in every way it possibly could for their benefit.

Why don’t Republicans want the truth to be told? Puh-lease! Because the Truth is, the Republican Party has its pants down around its ankles. It’s got its dick in its hands and is actively trying to force it on us. We keep saying “NO!” and they keep ignoring that fact.

They keep forcing Republican policies they KNOW the majority doesn’t want just like a rapist forcing his flesh into an unwilling victim’s. No means no means NO.

Rapists and sexual assaulters don’t stop being rapists and sexual assaulters just because they can’t rape and sexually assault people 24/7. They have to eat & sleep. They have to pay the rent. But a rapist eating and sleeping — going to his job — is still a rapist. He dreams of rape. He craves rape. Rape is how he solves all his problems.

A rapist feels entitled to rape people.

Just like Republicans feel entitled to cheat Americans from what THEY voted for — and force THEIR awfulness where it ain’t wanted.

We Live Inside A Giant False Narrative — That Donald Trump Is “Legitimate POTUS”

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

False narratives — creating them, living them, suffering the consequences of living them — it seems to go with being human. So, I’ll cut us some slack.

The unfortunate humans who live inside North Korea’s borders live inside a false narrative that Kim Jong-On isn’t a sociopathic madman at the helm of a hermitic dictatorship with nuclear weapons at his disposal. They think he’s a kind of god — just like his father and grandfather — because that’s what they’ve been told.

North Koreans have been deliberately fed a false narrative about how life and politics are. The point wasn’t to liberate them. One never creates a false narrative to do good things for people — despite what one tells oneself. You’re turning away from empirical truth — and choosing to walk toward fiction. Every step toward fiction is a step away from actual truth.

There may be lashings of truth IN your fiction — but, whereas facts won’t let you do with them what you want, with fiction? You can spin a story however you like. You’re bound by story logic — but not logic logic.

The biggest false narrative going, of course, is religion. The people who write religious texts — the Old Testament for instance — start out from a genuine place: they want to answer the big questions — what is life? How did we get here? Why are we here and what is the point of it all? Unless they’re wearing lab coats — with strict protocols for managing their experimentation — they’re going to pull the answers to those questions from their own heads. Or their asses.

If the men who wrote Genesis had access to the internet — if they had microscopes and telescopes available — if they knew about germ theory and plate tectonics — if they knew even that there were continents other than the one they lived on (they didn’t!) — would they have written the texts they wrote the way they wrote them? Of course not! Their worldview — even the questions themselves — would have been informed by their knowledge. They wouldn’t have written a Noah’s flood story they way they wrote it because the facts on the ground — literally — would have made such a story preposterous.

Sometimes — as with religion — the intention of the false narrative is to explain the world from the religion’s viewpoint. But, what if the starting viewpoint is wrong — or distorted. Or misinformed. What if monotheists are wrong and polytheists are right — there’s not one good, there are dozens, thousands, kajillions?

Who’s really to say? Got proof there’s only one “God”? Remind the class — who wrote that story? Oh, right — people who were “divinely inspired”. Another false narrative begins.

Even before he was sworn in, Donald Trump began signaling to us that he was not the legitimate president — that his win wasn’t what we thought it was. Take yourself back to election night 2016. Remember how it felt as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin went red? The story was just believable enough — the press had taken the “But her emails” ball and run wild with it. Doubts about Clinton could have been the difference — 78,000 votes spread between three states. It was just plausible enough for us to allow “Well, maybe…”.

That’s all it took. The truth is, to this day, we don’t know what happened in those three states. We don’t. But the stone cold fact is Paul Manafort handed Oleg Deripaska PROPRIETARY POLLING DATA for four states (the three mentioned plus Minnesota). That’s not nothing. That’s very sensitive data about Americans, who they are and how they vote — being handed to a man with deep ties to Russian Military Intelligence.

Russian military intelligence (for those slow on the uptake) is especially good at creating, disseminating and benefiting from propaganda. They’ve gotten very good at using social media to — say it with me — create false narratives. In those three states — we know this happened — Democratic voters (African American voters especially) found their Facebook pages inundated with ads disparaging Hilary Clinton — accusing her of being a racist on the down low.

Sure, plenty of those African American voters ignored those ads. But — we also know — some stayed home. That’s no different from a stolen vote. It’s election fraud — PERIOD.

Also — no one in an official capacity has ever done any forensics on the voting machines in those three states. As we’re learning more and more — any voting machine hooked up to the internet in any way is hackable. Anyone who denies that fact wants machines that are hackable in our elections. WHY?

Any voting process that isn’t hand-marked with a complete paper trail is bullshit.

People who want free and fair elections have no problems with oversight. They welcome it because it guarantees free and fair elections. People who want shortcuts — who are willing to take what election machine vendors (almost all Republican owned companies by the way — yes, it matters) say at face value — aren’t interested in Democracy, they’re interested in undermining Democracy. Not the same thing.

If the Rule Of Law is alive and well, then you cannot cheat to become president of the United States. You cannot ASK a foreign country to help you and you cannot ACCEPT THEIR HELP when offered. But that’s exactly what Donald Trump did — repeatedly and out in the open. The Mueller Report did not exonerate Trump in any way. Quick Reminder — the Mueller Report was not the be-all & end-all of “Trump-Russia” involvements. It addressed ONE — the Trump campaign’s relationship with Wikileaks. And the report said that it couldn’t ANSWER whether or not the Trump campaign conspired with Russia because of (Mueller Report Part Two) ALL THE OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE the Trump campaign were perpetrating.

All those SDNY investigations that Bill Barr slowed or blocked or snuffed? They would have begun exploring all the other ways Donald Trump, his campaign — and the whole Republican Party ultimately — had fallen prey to Russian intelligence. Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate is a non-stop reminder of just how corrupt the Republican Party is. Their defense didn’t rise to the level of “silly” it was so bad.

They don’t want to hear Bolton or any other witnesses because they KNOW what those witnesses will say. They KNOW what the evidence says — they’ve already heard what lots of it says. This is about keeping the truth about what happened out of the public record. WHY?

Most Republicans assume that once a lifetime judge is in place, he or she stays in place forever. Keep in mind — part of the point of this coup d’etat started years before the election. It took the form of Mitch McConnell hijacking the judiciary. He refused to let Obama appoint judges that he quickly filled once Trump was sworn in. He refused to grant Merrick Garland so much as a hearing. Hello, Neil Gorsuch.

But all that assumes we continue to accept the product of the false narrative Republicans created.

Let’s put this in terms even Donald Trump would understand. Let’s say the presidency was a beauty pageant. The winner gets lots of good things. They get to live in the White House. They get to tell the military what to do. They get to suggest and change laws. They get to appoint judges including Supreme Court judges.

That’s if they win — and they’re the Beauty Pageant WINNER.

But let’s say we find ample evidence that the Beauty Pageant Winner cheated. Let’s say the bribed judges — or threatened them. Let’s say the Winner conspired with people outside the pageant to pick a winner (outside the pageant’s rules). And let’s say these people succeeded. The Pageant’s real judges wanted Contestant X to win. That contestant reflected the Pageant’s values and hopes for the Pageant’s future.

But some of the judges, it turns out, were corrupt. The whole voting process, it turns out, was corrupted. When the judges voted — one of their votes was tallied the wrong way. Another judge went home sick and didn’t vote at all (food poisoning they think). From the moment the Winner was announced, lots of the judges — people in the audience, too — they knew something was wrong.

Okay — so the wrong person now wears the crown. They have all the power that comes with it — all the rights & privileges. But none of it actually belongs to them.

Now the Winner starts giving paying jobs to her friends. She fudges the books so no one can tell where the Pageant’s money is going. The Pageant starts co-branding with mobsters and criminals and all sorts of unsavory people the Pageant’s judges would never have agreed to. The Winner starts changing everything about the Pageant — despite the fact that they WEREN’T the actual winner and everything they’re doing goes directly AGAINST everything the judges ACTUALLY wanted and — this being democratic in theory — voted for.

But then, the judges discover evidence that PROVES the Winner cheated. They show it to the public because the public needs to know (while the Winner is doing things that directly impact them) — there’s a very good reason why the judges will now take away the Winner’s crown: it never belonged to them. EVER.

So — the Winner loses his crown. He can no longer claim to be the Winner because 1) he no longer is and 2) he never ever was.

Ah, but what of his “winnings”? What of the now-ex-Winner’s spoils? What of the laws they changed — though they had no authority to change them (only REAL winners have the LEGAL right to do that)? What of the lifetime judges they nominated THAT THEY HAD NO LEGAL AUTHORITY TO NOMINATE?

Remember all the judges Al Gore nominated? Exactly — he didn’t nominate any because he didn’t win — and was never given the authority. If he had tried to, we’d have laughed at him — “Dude, what’re you doing? You LOST. Losers don’t get to nominate anything.”

A cheater who’s been caught stops being “the winner”. A car thief has to give back the car he stole (provided it hasn’t been chop shopped into pieces already). He may have the memories of driving around in your ride, but all rights of ownership return to YOU, the rightful OWNER.

We The People “own” the outcomes of our elections. That is, we expect that our choice — if we’re in the majority — to be the basis for how our government will act. Provided our candidate followed all the laws in order to win the election, his or her actions are truly sanctioned by the electorate.

But, Donald Trump can’t say that about his “win”. He wasn’t sanctioned by he electorate. The majority of us voted not just FOR Hillary but AGAINST Trump and everything he stood for and wanted to do. We voted AGAINST destroying the government, AGAINST destroying our relationships with the world, AGAINST cozying up to Russia, AGAINST corruption in the extreme, AGAINST destroying the environment, AGAINST racism & misogyny & bigotry and judges who are FOR all those things.

The only reason Trump’s potus at all is because he manipulated the Electoral College. By literally STEALING Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania (for starters — we don’t know how pervasive the theft was), Trump robbed the American People of their actual choice. The victim of this crime is us, the American People.

What are we — crime victims in this — to do once the full depth of Trump (and the Republican Party’s) deep criminality gets revealed. Are we to shrug off the crime — and especially the part where the criminal gets to keep what he stole? Those judges — those laws — the dismantling of our system of checks and balances — that’s all stolen property. It belongs to US. It doesn’t belong to Donald Trump or the Republican Party.

They’re the car thief sitting in OUR CAR — in OUR DRIVEWAY — honking the horn at us at three in the morning.

What makes matters worse? Turns out the car thief has pals in the police department. Fact is, the thief knows the “chief of police”. That’s going to make prosecuting the car thief — and getting our car back — hard. But that doesn’t mean we don’t do it.

There’s a big “Come To Jesus” moment coming us by-and-by. We’re going to have to reconcile the false narrative we’ve been living in — that Trump’s the legitimate potus and everything he’s done is legit and inviolable — with the facts: Trump’s a criminal. He stole the outcome of election 2016 — and everything that goes with it.

Are we REALLY going to let him — and the Republican Party who benefited from it (that was the point, right?) continue to benefit when the benefits were never theirs to begin with?

If we do that — if we let thieves keep what they’ve stolen — we will not solve our problem. The criminals will continue to own us. They’ll continue to have a say in how we live our lives — and even run the Rule Of Law. If don’t recognize how stupid that will be?

We’ll deserve every bit of the horribleness that follows.

It’ll be “Slavery: The Sequel”.

You remember slavery, right? That’s the abomination we created a false narrative around — that it was acceptable for a Democratic Republic to have slavery.

Donald Trump Has NEVER Been The Legitimate POTUS; Everything Needs To Flow From That Fact

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

If I steal your car then – just to be an even bigger asshole – sit outside your house at four in the morning, the expensive stereo cranked up high, pounding the horn, it doesn’t make me the car’s owner. I can take the registration from the glove compartment and cross out your name (with a sharpie, like Donald) and scrawl in my name instead.

It STILL doesn’t make me the car’s owner. COS I STOLE IT FROM YOU!

To circumvent the Will Of The People is to steal their choice from them. Gerrymandering is (“was” hopefully) legalized circumvention of the majority’s will. Voter suppression is another form of legalized circumvention. That, too, needs to be relegated to the dust bin. The only reason to not want every eligible voter to vote is because you fear how they’ll all vote. IF you thought they’d vote FOR you — you’d drive them all the polls yourself.

That’s not what’s happening here. Do we really have to ask why?

Republicans have been forced into a corner by America’s rapidly changing demographics. Without literally cheating, they cannot win a presidency. Without the Electoral College tying the Democrats’ hands behind their backs, literally handing Republicans political power not merited by the actual slice of America they represent, Republicans wouldn’t get anywhere near winning a presidency.

The GOP — the GOP’s money actually (so we’re talking the Kochs & Mercers etc using Mitch McConnell as their point turtle) — hitched their wagon to Trump even KNOWING how compromised he was. No one’s stupid in this group. Steve Bannon surely hipped everyone with the money (he worked with the Mercers at Cambridge Analytica) — all of them having strange, dark religious bents — to the fact that Vladimir Putin’s end game wasn’t so far removed from theirs.

Make no mistake: the grand plan Vlad Putin launched against us worked better than even he expected only because he founds such a willing collaborator in the far right wing of the Republican Party. Because they let the Russian money flow freely down to every local election (can anyone say where ALL of the NRA’s Russia-originating money landed?), they corrupted every single race every single Republican ran in. Elections are free & FAIR or they ain’t. There’s no middle ground here.

Let’s not worry about voting machines here. No one’s examined them (officially). Lots of hard evidence exists that says those machines are almost instantaneously hackable. No one’s really looked at the strange way 77,000 votes across Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin line up with the proprietary polling data that Paul Manafort handed Oleg Deripaska (of the Russian GRU) that covered Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Let’s worry instead about HOW that weaponized polling data was played back onto DEMOCRATIC voters in those three states (plus Minnesota apparently) as propagandized ads on their individual Facebook pages. A voter who does not go to the polls — because they’ve been lied to in their homes ffs — is a vote for the other side. It is no different than CHANGING their vote in its impact relative to what that voter wanted from the election.

If we don’t get hip to the sophisticated weapon being used against us, we should just turn off the lights now. Before the Russians do it for us.

Look at election night and the way the news of Trump’s victory played in Trump’s own camp. They, too, were shocked by the win — not because they thought they’d pulled it out but because they were suddenly faced with the monstrosity they were now part of — A STOLEN ELECTION.

As Trump himself keeps harping on — an “illegitimate” election. Why, you have to ask, has Trump himself always worried about his own legitimacy.

Because he knows he has none.

Can we please, please, PLEASE cut to the end of THAT chase?

If Donald Trump stole the election — stole the Will of The American People from them, then he does not own either a “winning” outcome or anything that flowed from that “win” that wasn’t his. He can’t claim ownership to our car just because his Russian pal found a way to put him behind its wheel.

If Trump was never actually POTUS then he never had the authority to do what POTUSes do — like nominate judges to lifetime appointments.

And — by the way — every Republican who benefited from that same stolen outcome? Their “wins”, too, need to be seen in the light of treason.

Oh — it is very definitely treason. This is war time — cyber war. I’m quite clear this is World War Three we’re all living through. We just don’t know it yet because we still think wars require bombs, bullets & outright declarations.

If we keep thinking that, we’ll lose every war we ever fight going forward — starting with this one. Russia doesn’t think that — know what I mean?

A presidency stolen because of treason (and greed and stupidity and lots more greed) is not a presidency. Rules made by that presidency have no legitimacy and — like the judges — must be voided outright as if they never existed. They never had a “right” to exist.

If we’re really going to bring the Rule Of Law back — for real and for good — there can be no exceptions ever. It’s exceptions that break the Rule Of Law.

The Rule Of Law is pretty clear: thieves do not get to keep what they stole. I won’t get to keep your car after I’m caught and Trump (and the Reapublicans) shouldn’t get to keep what THEY stole either.

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.